Undulating Tees - Don't Make Sense

from Ron Whitten's photos in his Golf Digest article




I wasn’t going to post today but after shoveling a foot of snow, I wanted a break before starting on some work. So I ended up at Geoff Shackelford’s site http://www.geoffshackelford.com/ which I go to every single day to see what’s new.

On today’s list of articles is a link to Ron Whitten’s review of Chambers Bay.
The link to the article: http://www.golfdigest.com/golfworld/columnists/2008/02/gw20080215whitten?currentPage=2

There was one particular part of that article that got me laughing - it was a pitch down the middle of the plate that I could not resist.

“There is hardly a flat spot on the premises, and that includes the tee boxes. In what may be the first truly original design idea of the 21st century, Charlton convinced his colleagues to abandon traditional tee pads in favor of long, skinny, free-flowing ribbons of teeing space. Many are not much wider than walking paths; many are recessed rather than elevated; most are gently contoured with a variety of flats spots just the size of throw rugs. The idea is to pick the lie that might best help shape a shot off the tee: sidehill lies if you wish to fade or draw the ball, a slightly uphill lie if you need help getting airborne, a downhill lie if you want to keep it under the wind, or a flat lie. It's too early to know whether USGA officials will accept those unorthodox teeing areas for the U.S. Open. Jones hopes they will.”

"We'll probably address that after the [2010] U.S. Amateur," he says. "But it's not like there are no flat spots out there. We have dozens of 'batter's boxes' within the undulations. I would hope they'd position the markers far apart and let golfers chose their particular lies. Our goal was to get into the players' minds, even on the tee, and to put some integrity back into tee shots. Don't let them just stick a peg in the ground and bomb it."


from Ron Whitten's photos in his Golf Digest article





For what it’s worth Chambers Bay looks like a great Modern course and is perhaps the rival to Whistling Straights for the Best Modern Style course ever built.

Now what made me laugh was the idea for the tees - which is the worst idea I’ve heard in a long time. Ask any player where they want to tee their ball and they will ALL say on a flat lie. The reason is because that lie is predictable and that is what we practice on – a flat lie. If you need to “work” the ball, like they suggest you might want to, you will make an adjustment to your swing. There’s no way any player will CHOOSE an uneven lie to work the ball since it’s unpredictable – and they never actively practice this.

Here’s the secondary problem of this idea. Let’s say that 50% of the tees are flat and 50% has undulation. Given the choice, as I said before, all players will choose a flat lie. What we end up with is all the wear on the flat sections. If you think putting the tees only on the roll will solve this – go play a public course and watch what happens to the tee markers on a poor section of tee. I digress, essentially assuming the 50-50 ratio we have cut the useable area by not half but by in reality by 60% when you take in account of the lost area around those flat spots. So golfers will choose to go to 40% of the available tee every time. So what we have is a poorly conceived idea that will lead to concentrated wear. If the Jones team thinks golfers will accept this notion of uneven tees they’re kidding themselves. This is not “old school” as suggested but a completely foreign idea that will never be accepted.

I ask you to ask all your friends to see if anyone of them in competition would intentionally tee the ball up on an uneven section of a tee.

To Part 2