Normally a brief from a golf club or a client to a golf course architect is reasonably extensive. Something of an exception was Richard Sattler, the Barnbourgle owner who simply told Tom Doak and I – “I don’t care what you do – just don’t screw it up.”
Being a non-golfer (then but not now), he had no idea the difference between a course with a par of 69 and one adding up to 73, and 72 certainly wasn’t a number he had fixed in his head as a non-negotiable.
But talk to the average member (assuming such a person exists) about knocking the par of their home course down from 72 to 71 and you’d think it was both a criticism of the course and a demeaning suggestion to make it something less than the ‘norm’. No matter that just
