"Its gotta be fun... It's a game isn't it?!"
- Peter Jacobsen
During todays broadcast of The Players Championship on NBC which is annually played at TPC Sawgrass' The Stadium Course, Peter Jacobsen had a brilliant comment.... Johnny Miller was commenting about how great Pete Dye's The Stadium course is because of the hard and fun combination that it has when "Jake" interjects, cueing on the word fun, as Miller is looking for words to describe the "whatever it is" feeling that Dye has designed into the place. "Its gotta be fun... It's a game isn't it?!"
Its such an obvious statement, yet for some reason it always needs repeating to masses. Maybe it comes from watching the pros on tv or just some stigmatism the golf tends to come with, but I find many people forget that golf is game and rather focus on it being some kind of a test or exercise in skill and consistency. To much of the general golfing public gets wrapped up in the difficulty in hitting the little white ball, and forget golf is game and fun should be the overriding goal of every golf experience. Even architects forget this a lot of the time and make changes for a variety of reasons that doesn't always increase the "fun" of the course.
In my view if your are not going to make the course play in a way to make the overall experience more pleasurable then you should probably think twice about whatever changes you are about to make. Having a difficult golf course or set of holes on your course that are more difficult is great, but 99% of the time making something more difficult probably wont make it better or as good as it could be.
So lets set the record straight...
Golf is game, and its played for fun. Nobody ever said golf was also a fair game. Don't get fairness confused with difficulty. There is much more to difficulty than green speed and length.
Thank you Pete Jacobsen for that beautiful interjection. As it says in the first words on my homepage http://golfmeisterproductions.com/... PEOPLE PLAY GOLF FOR FUN
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