For the last month and a half, I’ve been working nonstop on a project attempting to illustrate what I believe to be a new way to look at golf design. And after more consecutive late nights of coding than I’d like to admit to my partner, I’ve finally cleared the first big hurdle. Here, I’m going to walk through the tool I’ve been furiously building from scratch to bring my way of looking at golf architecture – an expansion on Mark Broadie’s foundational strokes gained approach – to life.
It’s going to get a bit technical, so please bear with me.
The conundrum of strokes gained
For years, I have – simultaneously – been extremely frustrated by the “strokes gained” approach to golf laid out by Mark Broadie, while also openly telling everyone that it is both obviously correct and is probably the most important step forward in explaining the game to have been achieved in my lifetime. I don’t want to disparage Broadie or his thesis here: it is sound and rightly influential. By using the benchmark of average strokes to hole, players are able to solve for shot-for-shot performance, find the weakest part of their game, improve, etc. It’s everything golf should be about. Broadie bases everything in analytics, on real world data.
But I’ve always felt a constant nagging that something was missing. My frustration was clear: where is the room for strategic architecture in a theory where only distance matters? The frustration was so persistent that I even bought and read through Broadie’s book, Every Shot Counts, to make sure I wasn’t missing any aspects of the thesis that might take care of the problem of strategy.
The strokes gained benchmarking system requires “like-for-like” comparison, and, to be perfectly honest, using distance is an entirely reasonable way to do a comparison. I just kept thinking about how some positions on the golf course are better than others, even when they are both the same distance from the hole. An obvious example would be two shots of the same distance, but one is taken from the fairway and the other from a bunker. The strokes gained approach would treat these shots as different in kind: hitting off the fairway vs sand vs rough are not like-for-like shots. They must be benchmarked against other shots from the same distance of the same kind.
For me though, when looking at golf hole design, this still doesn’t go far enough. If we care about design, then the same shot from two different angles simply can’t be the same shot. If a green tilts left-to-right, it should be easier to approach from the right side than the left side. Why? A shot from the right side hits the green where it’s tilted toward the player, which helps stop the ball. A shot from the left is just more likely to run off the green. When we start averaging these shots together, we lose the strategic positional elements through dilution. So, how can a theory as obviously correct and effective as Broadie’s still be unsatisfying? I sat with this conundrum for years.
Standing Broadie on his head
I finally found my solution by leaning into the theory instead of pushing back against it. Okay, fair enough. Strokes-to-hole is obviously the most important metric we should be looking at, so let’s look at a world where the only thing that matters is distance.
Let’s say we have a golf hole with no features: no bunkers, no contours, and everything is a perfectly flat fairway. Playing this hole is effectively an applied driving range exercise. This is a world in which only distance matters. This is a place where I fully endorse the strokes gained approach.
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