[kylsq0Ln]

So I thought I would mention this to you guys and see if you might know something about course maintenance at this time of year and whether or not that has anything to do with what I am seeing out on the course.

We have often discussed course design with many golfers seemingly fine with visual trickery and the kinds of things that the designer does to make his course interesting and challenging. I am of the same mind. At the same time we will often comment that we do not like gimmicks and don’t find them either interesting or appealing.

The issue is pin placements. I am seeing an incredibly high number of pin placements where the ball is turning hard just at the hole and I mean just at the hole!

That to me is either caused by someone doing pin placement that does not know what he or she is doing or somebody using a gimmick to make the green more difficult to putt. It was so bad in a couple of cases today that you had to whack the heck out of the ball just to get it to make it to the hole and have it drop.

I think I read somewhere that a common leave that is considered reasonable for a guy who is a decent putter is 17” on a putt of less than 20’. If you tried to leave yourself 17” past the hole on a number of the greens I was putting today you would never have had a chance to hole the putt as the ball would have been going too slowly as it approached the hole. Worse than that regardless of the leave, you still had to ram your putt in or it took that break right at the hole and off it went.

So before I mention it to the club pro and the greens keeper, I thought I would first ask you guys if this has something to do with some sort of early winter, late fall maintenance issue. Clearly in order to get the ball to break right at the hole the pin has been placed such that it is right at the crown of the green. Is anybody else seeing the same thing? If this is not common and just happening at the course I have settled on playing for the most part here at the end of the year then clearly this is some issue specific to this course.

Any idea what might be going on?