What Colonial shows us about green speed...

[2over]

One of my takeaways from Colonial is we see that if greens are fairly slow (they say 11.5 but looks more like 10, British Open speed--those guys are freaking hammering their putts!) and receptive the best in the world will just shoot the lights out when they're on their games. I think the lightning fast, rock hard tour greens (13+ sometimes!) only give us the illusion that good amateur sticks are closer to the pros than we really are. I'd like to see green speed limited to 10 on all the tours and as a rule of golf for clubs and munis. It would save a tremendous amount of money and maintenance, make the game much more ecologically friendly and more fun for the vast majority and give a more realistic indication of how good the pros actually are.

Knowing a Korn Ferry tour player and seeing his game up close many times, I realize how seriously, seriously good these guys are--what he does to a very difficult Arnold Palmer 7450 yard course when the greens are 10ish on the stimp is just filthy. A 63 in a practice round would be expected on a normal day. In a college tournament with the greens running 12+ and rock hard he went 63-64.

 

[acemandrake]

Conundrum...

 

Paul Goydos once said that firm course conditions is the only way to challenge today's pros

 

The PGA would tell you that viewers want to see birdies

[ThinkingPlus]

No wind = low scores. Green speed is probably hurting most of the guys rather than helping just because they are accustomed to so much faster. Also their putters are weighted based on the assumption the speeds will be 12.5 - 13.

[farmer]

Colonial's greens also are not particularly hard to read. There is not a single potato chip green on the course.

[golfandfishing]

“I'd like to see green speed limited to 10 on all the tours and as a rule of golf for clubs and munis”

 

not only do I not want to see the USGA mandating course conditions for the game via a rule, but........ who would the penalty apply to if the greens were rolling at 11?

[CCTxGolf]

very Interesting question. Who would be on the hook and lay the price? I would assume that the rule would be a range like 10-12 our 9-11. But who would pay if the mark was missed. Certainly doesn’t seem fair to put the venue in that kind of negative spotlight. Maybe the pga officials that no doubt are there for weeks before an event? And even then what good would that do...

i do love the idea of making and standard green speed (range) though. Maybe waiving it for the us ilen.

[mallrat]

Pretty opinionated on this so bare with me.

First off green speeds mean nothing and are purely for vanity. What does it mean or matter what the number is? Green speeds should reflect the condition of the course. Now some courses can consistently run 11+ but that is the exception to the rule. No reason to sacrifice or stress your turf that much, in fact healthier turf at a 10 will most likely roll as good or better than a very stressed out 13.

Second, greens speeds should match the contours of the greens. Some US Opens. Econ’s a joke because the speed doesn’t match the slope. Speed alone is not the only factor in pros going low. Many of the modern greens that are twice the size with multiple ridges can’t handle a 12+. Now some can but the same can be said for many older style greens. I think the R & A does a much better job managing this than the USGA.

3rd, over 90% of the golfers have no clue what their actual green speeds are. I’m amazed how often people say how fast a green is when it is in the 9 range. We keep ours around that and everyone thinks they are 10+. We average 60k rounds a year so we need to keep the turf healthy for that much wear. Most people, even many here would have no clue what to do with a 13. Short story on this, my last course was 36 holes, 1 is a Nicklaus design. Jack came out to play it for a big opening or something about 15 years ago. After the 4th hole Jack asks to talk to the Super. BasicAlly asks the super the green speed and the super at the time didn’t believe in stomping the greens. Ends up the 2 Assts had to go water the rest of the greens in front of them to hold the greens.

sorry for my rant and carry on

[golfandfishing]

So.... penalize the committee 2 strokes? Okey dokey.

[anythingfinite]

The beauty of golf is that every course is almost perfectly different. Different grass, different challenges, etc. Green speeds should be the same. Learning the course you are playing is part of the challenge.

Now, each golfer has his/her own preferred speeds, but that is also true of every other facet of the game.

Mandating any sort of universal set up is completely ridiculous and 100% against the spirit/point of the game.

[gvogel]

Just to add a bit to the discussion, the Tour is going to prepare Muirfield Village two different ways for the two tournaments to be played back to back next month.

For the first one - the Workday event - rough is going to be 3" and green speeds will be 11 on the stimp. Expect a shorter set up. For the traditional Memorial tournament, the rough will be grown to 4" and the greens will stimp at 13.

[CCTxGolf]

Exactly

[munichop]

If we get mandated green speeds how will I justify all the different putters I own to my wife?

[Obee]

Plenty of very, very fast greens all over the country. You are correct about most people not understanding green speeds, but at the country club level I've noticed most people UNDER estimate green speeds. I own a stimpmeter and regularly stimp greens just to see how close people can get. I'm usually within 1/2 a foot with my guess.

fastest I ever stimped was Monterey Peninsula CC at the 2006(?) California Amateur. 14.25. Bent/poa greens in California can get crazy fast when the weather is cool and the super wants to push them and has the green light to do so.

Bear Creek (home course for 9 years) I stimped at 13.75 just prior to Champions Q School one year. The tour came in and asked us to slow them down 2 feet. We played them at 12 1/2 to 13 1/2 for a good month or two every year for several years. Any decent golfer can putt greens that fast if you give them a couple rounds to adjust.

Sandpiper's greens in Santa Barbara are regularly 12ish and can get faster if they want to push them, which they do for tourneys. Lakeside has their greens at 12.5 to 13 every year for The Kelly Cup. Saticoy's greens are legendarily fast, as can be Mission Viejo's.

I could go on and on. I'm pretty passionate about green speeds, too. :-)

 

 

[PowderedToastMan]

Green speed is super overrated. Ever notice how tour pros hate bumpy greens the few times a year they play on them? Slow or fast, they can score on predictable greens. It’s when there are bumps and the surface isn’t perfect that putts per round jumps up.

Most amateurs don’t have good putting strokes, so a perfect putting surface actually exposes their flaws.

 

[scott_Donald]

Am I the only one who finds the faster the greens the better I putt.

I was brought up on good links greens but I putt better on faster US greens.

[ThinkingPlus]

Faster frequently equates to smoother greens. Thus, once you acclimate to the speed your make percentage goes up because fewer putts bump offline.

[scott_Donald]

The greens at my home course are normally perfect links greens, I can't complain ever really. For me it has something to do with a shorter stroke so less to go wrong.

[ThinkingPlus]

Shorter stroke helps as well. Less opportunity for the stroke to go offline.

[mallrat]

I’m not saying there is not fast greens and I’m not saying there are slopes on greens that can handle fast greens. My last course we kept one of the 18’s around 11-12 and the members side 12 or over. For the club championship they were roughly a 14 and we had to dial them back a bit the second day because they were really stressed. But those greens were BIG and not a ton of slopes ridges and could handle it.

I’ll use the Bandon courses for example since a lot here have played them. You couldn’t run the greens at Pacific or Old Mac at a 13, you wouldn’t be able to keep a ball on the green or hold a green.

Not sure if you thought I was saying green speeds should not be fast. But I don’t think your average muni could use fast greens or it would slow down play.

[smashdn]

What is good for golf is not necessarily what is good for tv ratings. I'd like to think the integrity of the game trumps tv ratings and money but I am not that naive. This is probably why the tour pros have such animosity towards the USGA regarding US Open set ups. (That is not to say that the USGA is always good for golf or that they have not gotten US Open set ups wrong.)

 

There is golf the game and golf the tv sport. There are lots of things that I think are intrinsic to the game but modern tv golf has limited or eliminated. I could go on but don't feel the need to drag this off topic. I agree with Paul though, firm conditions make the architecture come alive.

[mallrat]

But you can have firm conditions and still slow things down a bit. Or from my understanding they are not mutually exclusive

[smashdn]

Absolutely correct. You can be firm and fast or firm and slow if you'd like. On greens speed is a product of height of cut and slope. Whether they are firm has to do with what is going on in the soil/sand beneath the grass for the most part.

I like the idea of slowing them down but keeping them firm. Guys here make fun of the putting strokes of Hogan and others during that era but those guys actually had to hit the ball to get it to the hole. There was an actual stroke to get the ball moving. They couldn't just pick a line and get it rolling. But on the flip side they didn't have to worry with the ball rolling way past the hole and having a 8'+ come backer.

From a preference standpoint I like the new mini-dwarf bermuda greens. They seem to stay firm (especially new greens with no thatch layer built up) due to, I guess, the ability to keep them drier and still alive as compared to bent greens. My limited understanding of bent greens is that bent is not super robust grass when cut to greens height. You let it get a little taller and adopt cultural practices that create deep roots then you dry it out and firm it up.

[jsnoland]

The discussion of "speed" and greens is so, so frustrating IMO. The reality is that stimp - looked at in isolation - does not really tell the full story. It's one thing to roll 14 on the stimp at a course with very flat greens; it's something totally different to be rolling 14 on another course with severely pitched putting surfaces. The Stimpmeter reading, in my opinion, really needs to be looked at IN COMBINATION with the PITCH of the putting surfaces to have any real meaning.

The Tour has recognized this (sort of) in dictating its course design requirements to architects - for example, the PGA Tour places a limit on the maximum grade that a course's greens may have, mainly so that the Tour can reasonably mow each green to their desired speed on the stimp without worry of creating unreasonable playing conditions (pay attention, USGA). They also set forth that pins must be placed in areas where there is a 2' radius of similar grade, so that a pin cannot be placed on the edge of a cliff. Finally, I believe they require each putting surface to have a minimum number of pinnable locations that meet these standards as well.

What I would find interesting is if a more comprehensive measurement standard could be implemented - something that took into account BOTH stimp reading AND the average grade of the putting surfaces at a particular venue, as this might create a way to have true comparability across venues. For example, perhaps the new measurement could ADD the stimp reading to the average grade of the greens at the venue - if the stimp is 10 and the average grade is 4%, that would give us a "Stimp-Grade" of 14. Or another venue rolling 14 on the stimp but with average grades of 1% would have a Stimp-Grade of 15. This could help make two very different venues actually comparable.

It's kind of like how golf uses BOTH a rating AND a slope in determining handicaps, or how baseball combined on base percentage and slugging percentage to get the frequently-quoted OBP stat. In both of those cases, the powers that be (golf and baseball) recognized that traditional metrics (course rating, in the case of golf, and batting average, in the case of baseball) didn't tell the whole story. A combined look helped to provide more meaningful metrics - slope and OBP - that are heavily used today.

Keep in mind this is just my hypothesizing - I haven't done any actual analysis to create a "perfect" measurement. I'm sure someone smarter than me could come up with a better way of common-sizing all of this. But at the end of the day, until there is some way of standardizing this generic notion of "speed" (whatever that is), this oh-so-tiresome and unproductive discussion will never go anywhere meaningful.

 

 

[mallrat]

My only experience is with some Bent and Poa. That is one nice thing about Poa is the shallow root system. They dry out early but bounce back over night. The bent putter well but was finicky and extremely susceptible to moss, also if something went wrong it took a LOT of work to get it back. Poa gets a bad wrap but there are some courses up here (Pacific Northwest) that keep them in the 13-14 range and very healthy. Currently we aren’t as fast as we would like but we kind of can’t get there because of the volume of play. One huge difference though is our HOC. Currently we stay at 125 through the summer but the bent course got them down to 095. All things equal that .03 difference was good for about 2 on the stimp it seemed.

[trilerian]

I think green speeds should be based on the overall course design. If the course is designed to have long irons hit into the greens, then long irons should hold the greens. If there is a ton of contour, then the greens should be slower, pretty simple stuff. Don't make the greens impossible. One course I play is very hilly, so hilly that looking at the slope of the green vs the landscape around you will give you no clue how putts break. And they make the greens way too fast. I've had 10' downhill putts that I have tapped, go by the hole by 15'. I've had putts go up and look like they would die right above the cup, come back down the other side and roll off the green. But fast greens on a flat surface, yep, those are great.

On a side note, I have no idea how fast a 10 or 12 on the meter rolls. I've never been able to get a straight answer from the pro shops on how fast the greens are.

[adl300]

this is true. speed of the green should reflect the design of the golf course.