McGinley ‘comes out’ for FineGolf

Following our highlight of Tiger Wood’s love of the running game, Irishman Paul McGinley is interviewed in this month’s Golf Monthly and passes on some erudite thoughts, particularly on modern golf course design:

“I’m a great advocate of firm golf courses. If you give a player a 30-yard wide fairway and it is soft, the fairway is 30 yards wide. But if you make the same fairway firm, it plays only 10 yards wide and if you don’t hit the middle, you’re running off the fairway.

There is a fundamental misunderstanding about what makes a course difficult for professionals. People think that if it is 7,700 yards and they make it really soft, forcing us to hit 5-irons into greens as opposed to 8-irons, that’s going to make it tough. But that’s not what makes it tough for us. If the ball is in the air and stopping when it lands on the deck, it is under our control. Professional golfers are so good at controlling the ball from A to B. But if you make the course firm, so that when the ball lands it runs on the deck, it is out of our control. That’s what makes a golf course difficult. So a 6,600-yard layout that is firm plays extremely tricky. We can’t overpower it. But we don’t play golf courses like that anymore for a number of reasons, particularly TV.

All you have to do is make the course rock hard, but instead the owners are spending vast amounts buying extra land and building new tee boxes. I’d like that money to be put into the agronomy of a course. How can we make this course firm again? If it rains how can we get it firm again?

Then course management comes into it. This was a massive factor in the days of Faldo, but not so important in the days of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the two who have dominated the world rankings in the last decade, but whose driving accuracy has consistently been around 150th on the PGA tour.

Courses are manicured so well to look good on TV for professional events, but when it comes to ones that are fun to play my favourite is Baltray (County Louth) because I feel I can shoot 62 or 75. It gives me something and it’s the same for amateurs. A 12-handicapper can break 80 there. If he doesn’t, he wants to go back and try again. He’s not losing five or six balls in lakes around the course.

I’m doing some golf course design at the moment, and although lakes and streams are important, often for drainage, my view on course design is that the game is so difficult for amateurs that intimidating courses make the game less pleasurable. I’m on my fourth course and it’s all based around that idea. I want a course that gives and takes. I don’t want to bust a guy’s balls, to use the expression. When I finish my career, that’s going to be the main area. I’ve got a passion for course design and I’ve got a really clear view on how courses should be.”

FineGolf welcomes yet another professional golfer ‘coming-out’ in favour of the fine running game and thanks Golf Monthly for its exposure of an advocate of the FineGolf trend.