Dear Anonymous,
No, no, and of course! The
2007 World Golf Village (WGV) putting-course event starts August 25.
Actually, I've putted the World Golf Village course before (last year in March). It's sort of an odd course. The grass is tough (Florida dwarf bermudagrass), and the holes are designed to look like miniature golf holes as seen on a score card or aerial photo of a course -- i.e., long lozenges with a tee at one end and a hole at the other. Typically, the first putt is 40-50 feet or longer. So the challenge of the course is whether you can two-putt at worst and make more one-putts from long distance than anyone else.
The WGV putting course is a bit of a disappointment compared to what it coulda-shoulda been. In fact, the putting course is smack in the middle of the WGV property next to the Renaissance resort but there is NO DETAIL about the course on the WGV website and the
WGV Renaissance Resort website has lots of great photos of the property, but ZERO photos of the putting course. That should tell you something! I wouldn't consider the WGV putting course worldclass by any means, and it really appears to be little more than an after-thought add-on to the property without much design energy given the project.
In comparison, there are plenty of truly world-class championship putting courses around, including:
the
Mount Juliet Championship Putting Course in County Kilkenny, Ireland, with its annual National Putting Championship:
the west in California at
Marriott's Desert Spring Resort:
Reno, Nevada's
Red Hawk Resort and the Hale Irwin putting course; Las Vegas'
Angel Park and the "Seventh Heaven" putting course at the
Arnold Palmer Design facility;
and the
Arizona Biltmore Resort putting course by
Panks-Graham Design in Phoenix:
and Colorado's
Adams Rib Ranch and the 36-hole Andy Johnson putting course in Vail Valley at the Tom Weiskopf course Adams Mountain CC;
the midwest at Michigan's
Hawk Hollow and it's Little Hawk 54-hole bent-grass putting course in Bath, MI and
Bucks Run with its Putting Island course in Mt. Pleasant, MI;
the Northwest of Montana's
Big EZ Lodge,
Utah at the
Cascade Golf Center in Orem, UT; the
Zermatt Resort and Spa in Midway, UT, with an "executive putting course";
Washington's
"Rusty Putter" course at Newcastle Golf Club in Seattle by Cupp and Couples);
and the "themed"
Rainbow Run putting course at Willows Run Golf Course in Redman, WA;
Hawaii at the Big Island's
Hilton Waikoloa Seaside Putting Course:
Maui's
Kapalua Golf Academy with its Hale Irwin-designed 18-hole putting course; the
Lodge at Koele on the Island of Lana'i;
plus others in Canada, Baja, the Bahamas, and Europe.
There are a number of stand-alone putting courses out west and around Island resorts (try this
Google search for "championship putting course" or this one for
"grass putting course").
This sort of the "grass putting course" challenge is similar to miniature "putt-putt" tournaments, except the courses of the old "Putt-Putt" franchise with patented hole designs (not the "crazy golf" with loop-de-loops and windmills and jungle animals) feature a very consistent and true surface and fairly consistent predictability in how the ball reacts with the rails and the obstacle features. (See
"Putt-Putt" in Wikipedia.) In Putt-Putt competition, every hole usually has only ONE optimal play, which is the starting position on the tee matt, the first point of contact with a rail or obstacle, and the strength or pace of the putt to make it all work. (The competitiors all know one another like a close-knit family and they readily share the consensus "best shots" with players who arrive too late to get in the needed prep work to learn the shots: "hole #5 is position 3 off the right rail starting off the matt across the cigarette burn on the carpet five feet out".) The winner is the player who knows all these same 18 shots and is the best in executing them with the LEAST two-putt holes. A champion round of top-level Putt-Putt competition is around 21 putts for 18 holes or 15 one-putts and only three two-putts. This is VERY good. A more usual three-round set of scores for the winner is something like 25-23-24. (See the
Professional Putters Association (PPA) website for typical events and scores, or see the
2007 PPA National Championship scores for a really good idea of the range of performance in this 8-round competition.) The winner is the top-level performer that week who makes the FEWEST two-putts for the series of rounds in the competition.
Applying this same approach to the WGV putting course is complicated by the fact that the grass is not as true as Putt-Putt surfaces, the hole location changes daily, and the green speed varies daily and perhaps from hole to hole. Even so, because of the "long lozenge" shapes, the basic first putts off the tee are pretty much covering the same familiar paths to the far end where the hole is located. So whoever wins the WGV competition will probably be very familiar with the course (like a home-course advantage or a Putt-Putt course where the player has done his prep work to learn all the shots hole-by-hole) and who also is the one who can generate the most one-putt holes.
My guess is that the winner on the WGV course would have a best-round score in the vicinity of 9-10 one-putts (compared to the Putt-Putt total around 15 one-putts). So the basic difference is between making the FEWEST two-putts (Putt-Putt) and making the MOST one-putts (WGV Putting Course) while also never doing worse than two putts per hole in either sort of event.
One never knows who would win, but I'm a pretty good lag putter at that range, so I've got the "never worse than two-putt" skill needed to contend, but who knows which player on a given day or series of days can generate the MOST one-putts on a course like this? I of course would enter such a competition "intending" to win and there's certainly no harm in also "expecting" to win!
This brings up a very interesting psychological point about playing the PGA Tour events whenever Tiger Woods is in the field. Tiger of course "expects" to win anytime he tees it up, but who else can really say that? For everyone else, the realistic "expectation" is that they can only win if they can play better than Tiger, which is usually only the case when Tiger has an "off" day or two. Rory Sabatini and the rest really think in terms along the lines that "Tiger can be beat" in the occasional tournament. That's not a player who "expects" to win, but a player who "hopes" to win if he does his best and he gets a break or two along the way. The rest of the field these days pretty much think this way, too. Yes, the player "believes he has the game to win", which is the usual Tour-player "confidence" or "ego", but that is hardly the same as the player standing on the first tee box of a 4-day event with Tiger Woods also in the field "expecting" to win. Ernie Els assesses his game these days with a lot of "confidence" and has a lot of "hope" that he can win a given event when Tiger is in the field, but to say that he really "expects" to win is a stretch. But not for Tiger.
In the different eras of golf history, there have been dominant players who really "expected" to win over all other players in the field so long as they played at their slightly above-average level for all four days: Harry Vardon, Walter Travis, Walter Hagen, Bobby Jones, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, and now Tiger Woods. Walter Hagen was known to brashly call out on the first tee with the jaunty question: "Which one of you boys plans on being second this week?"
In terms of the WGV event, I would very likely not fall in the "expect" category of participants because I don't compete daily for a living, and a few other obscure reasons!
Cheers!
Geoff Mangum
Putting Coach and Theorist
PuttingZone.com
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