The rugged 12th hole at TPC Boston—imaginatively re-designed by Gil Hanse to the consternation of many competitors at the Dell Technologies Championship—consolidated a hard truth. Being a course architect, especially one who designs holes to be played by the best golfers in the world, is getting increasingly more difficult.
That’s because, even as most of the courses on the professional tours have been stretched to a near-breaking point, the game for the world’s best golfers keeps getting easier to perform (which is not in any way to say it is getting easier to win).
Through advances in clubs and balls, fitness, technique and agronomy, tour players keep hitting the ball farther and proportionately straighter, with less fear of a disastrous miss. They are leaving themselves shorter irons into greens (very often some kind of wedge), clubs designed to produce the combination of accuracy, height and spin that allows stopping power around the hole. It adds up to a lot of birdie chances inside 15 feet, the distance from which the vast majority of putts are converted.