Lee Trevino, first poll Corridor of Famer
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There’s not often a uninteresting second when Lee Trevino takes the dais.
So it was on Tuesday at Nice Valley Nation Membership, in Little Rock, Ark., the place the 85-year-old legend fielded questions from the press prematurely of the Simmons Financial institution Championship.
In true Trevino vogue, his responses have been freewheeling and wide-ranging, concerning all the things from reminiscences of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer to why he doesn’t watch many NFL video games. (“Not numerous Mexicans enjoying soccer,” he stated.)
Among the many different matters he addressed: golf-course design.
In contrast to Nicklaus, Palmer and different big-name gamers of his technology, Trevino by no means branched into the golf-architecture enterprise. And as he readily conceded, he hasn’t seen as many programs as most of his friends.
“I received began late in life, as you properly know,” Trevino stated. “I used to be 28 years previous once I began enjoying skilled golf. The one golf course that I knew earlier than that was Tenison Park, which was a public course in Dallas.”
Backside line: He didn’t take numerous buddies’ journeys.
“I’ve missed rather a lot,” Trevino stated. “I’ve missed numerous nice programs that I’ve not performed.”
However what sort of programs does he think about nice?
Requested to call the best U.S. Open venues, Trevino had excessive reward for the same old suspects, together with Oakmont, Pebble Seashore and Merion, the location of one among Trevino’s two U.S. Open wins.
Arduous to argue with any of these.
The extra puzzling feedback got here when Trevino turned to fashionable course design. Right here, Trevino received to speaking about blind pictures and hidden hazards. He isn’t a fan, and he thinks that they’ve been created for the mistaken motive: to defend in opposition to the world’s greatest gamers.
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“One of many causes that the architects in my view are hiding issues is just because they’re attempting to make them — we’ve fallen into a spot of attempting to make a golf course difficult to the skilled,” Trevino stated. “That’s not the place the spine of this sport is at. The spine of this sport is within the high-handicap, the mid-handicap, the girl participant, the junior.”
He’s proper concerning the sport’s spine. However as for modern-course design? Possibly he was pondering of the Nineteen Nineties. In newer many years, a modern-minimalist motion has given rise to just about the alternative of what Trevino describes. Underneath the affect of such designers as Invoice Coore, Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and David McLay Kidd, to call just some, the emphasis has fallen on approachability and enjoyable.
Now, greater than ever, programs are being constructed with the typical leisure golfer in thoughts. Among the many ensuing tendencies is a transfer away from golf as high-flying aerial assault. At most of the best modern-day designs, from Bandon Dunes to Gamble Sands and Streamsong and past, designers are encouraging the bottom sport, giving gamers a variety of choices past the usual Tour professional energy play.
Trevino appears to see issues by means of a unique lens.
“What they’re doing is that they’re beginning to make golf programs to the place all the things is carry,” Trevino stated. “You’ll be able to’t roll the ball on the inexperienced anymore. There’s no such factor as a inexperienced being open within the entrance, you recognize. They’ll put that inexperienced to the place it’s a boomerang sort and so they’ll bunker all of the entrance and sides.”
Truly, they don’t. Not nowadays. However let’s not maintain it in opposition to Trevino. By his personal account, he doesn’t get round to a ton of programs, and even when he isn’t maintaining on the newest design tendencies, he understands a reality about good storytelling: You don’t at all times have to let the information get in the best way.
