Perspective from the 19th Hole is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf. Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist. This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write. I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf. The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie. And it is where you want to be on a golf course.
I suspect not many people would care about this subject.
But for those of us who play a lot of golf, it’s critical.
Where the pin is placed on a golf hole either makes the hole fair or unfair.
The trouble is this: There are no hard and fast rules for pin placement and, so, that makes the subject open to interpretation.
Hard to imagine that, with all of golf’s often arcane rules, there is not one for pin placement.
All of this has come up for me recently where I play most of my golf, Illahe Hills Golf and Country Club in Salem, Oregon.
Why?
We have a new member of our maintenance crew setting the pins and he has not a good job all the time. Sometimes the pins are on ledges that make it impossible for even a good putt to remain near the hole.
So, as a good researcher, I went on-line to ferret out the specific golf rules – or, in this case, advice on setting pins. Here is a summary of what I found:
“The consensus is that you want to cut the hole on an area of the green where it’s relatively level, with three feet of flat ground around the pin. If you drop a ball from waist-height near the hole, it shouldn’t roll away.
“In general, pins should be placed as the USGA recommends — at a relatively level area a minimum of 12 feet from the fringe of the green and in accordance with the conditions of the day, but not in an unfair position that makes it impossible to receive a well-executed shot. Fairness and variety are the best guides to proper pin placement.
“Official Golf Rule 15.3 deals with this – and it says, ‘the most important factor when deciding where to place a hole is good judgment in deciding what will give fair results.’”
There you have it.
Subjective? Yes. Good advice? Yes.
Setting pins is an inexact, but important, process. I remember a case a number of years ago when I was watching my son play in a college golf tournament at tournament. At one of the par 5 holes, the Stanford coach was out at the site apologizing to players as they came through. Many of them were four and five-putting, given the bad pin.
Of course, in that situation, there was no way to make a change mid-tournament. So, the apology was the best option.
So, here at Illahe, I intend to make sure the person setting pins on “my” golf course carries the advice above with him around the course.
Perspective from the 19th Hole 