When golf in America was thriving, during the period affectionately known today as the Golden Age, the game was pure. There were no frills and no over-indulgences. None of the excesses that plague the game today existed yet. Golf was just a game, a challenging, yet enjoyable, pursuit that brought people out into nature and out into their communities.

 

However, during the second half of the twentieth century golf began to devolve into something else entirely: a game more akin to bowling than golf, demanding accuracy or else. Courses were routed through rows of homes, trees were planted, and ponds or bunkers were placed along both sides, isolating hole corridors and cutting golfers off from each other and also from any meaningful strategy. The only goal on each hole was to find the center of the ever-shrinking fairway and the center of the ever-shrinking green; the antithesis of the golden age thinking of Simpson and his peers.

 

Over the past two decades, the golf course design industry has slowly been ascending back toward the tenets that attracted so many people to the game when it was thriving in its infancy. These tenets, Strategy, Enjoyment, and Variety, are the cornerstones to our design philosophy at Ross Golf Design.