Clive Clark believes golf courses should be designed to challenge players rather than punish them.
The former Open Championship contender and Walker Cup and Ryder Cup player, who has designed more than 30 courses around the world, says the best layouts force golfers to think their way around the course while still giving them a chance to shoot a good score.
It is a philosophy evident at the heart of his design of Dumbarnie Links. The NCG Top 100s team noted it offered both professionals and club golfers a testing and exciting experience. It’s a course that intentionally features wide fairways and holes that will give up birdie opportunities if you play from the tees most relative to your ability.
Dumbarnie also features several short par 4s where players can take an aggressive approach. This aligns with Clark’s belief that links courses should be designed to give golfers plenty of options to play a hole.
He told the NCG Top 100s podcast: “Our fairways here are like velvet carpets and are beautiful. The whole course is kept exceptionally well, and that that’s part of the experience. People love playing not only a well designed but [a] conditioned golf course.
“Club golfers, any golfers for that matter, don’t like searching for the golf ball in rough. So, why have very penal rough and narrow fairways here at Dumbarnie?
“The fairways are a nice size, generally about 45 yards wide. If you go off them, you’ve hit a poor shot. But we don’t allow rough so long where people have to start searching for their ball. That now annoys the people behind because they’ve got to wait, so on and so forth.”
Golf should be fun
For Clark, the golfer is always at the centre of his course design. While a course should provide a test and force players to think about their strategy, he believes there is little value in making it unnecessarily difficult for the sake of it.
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“I generally figure out who’s going to play the course that I’m designing. And generally, it’s members or the general public, and I design them to help let them get round, to let them be happy.
“I don’t design penal golf courses. I hope I design courses that give a very interesting view of the course and the way people can play it and get round. Club members, guests at a daily fee, they don’t enjoy being hammered to death by a golf course.
“I think even the more penal golf course designers now have sort of tamed down (their designs) a bit. They’ve actually realised people are complaining that it’s too hard to play. It punishes them.”
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