There was a course I used to play often. Big sloping greens, and on this particular day I played with a guest who remarked how great my putting was. “If must have taken you a long time to figure out these greens”. “Not really” I said, “it’s pretty obvious the putt is going to break two feet to the right when you have slopes that are so huge”. Generally, when we see greens with huge slopes we get pretty excited. It’s great eye candy. See those same slopes at dusk, with all the shadows and we are totally mesmerized.
Here is the problem… after one round, those greens have totally revealed themselves. I know it’s breaking left, my playing partner’s know it’s going left, the beverage cart girl knows it’s going left. Has that really done anything for my brain?
RSPGL has very subtle greens. I have to be honest… the first time I played them, I thought they were boring. Boring did not make me putt better. Matter a fact, I putted worse. It looks like it goes right, but it actually stays straight. Move a little to the left, and then the putt does break right. But if I move 8 ft to the left, it straightens out again and maybe even goes a hair left. Yet, I can’t see any of that???
One of the reasons you like RSPGL, yet you struggle to verbalize why you like it, is that the greens reveal themselves very slowly. This isn’t a “play it once, now I got it” course. You need to play it a lot to figure out the breaks. It takes incredible restraint to design very subtle greens. Greens sitting at grade also confounds the illusions. Not knowing exactly how it’s going to break is one of the great puzzles in golf, and that’s another reason why RSPGL is interesting.
