It is described as play without fault or fluke.  Golf’s standard for excellence, like the four-minute mile, is a goal pursued by many but reached by few. So intertwined with the game, it is difficult to imagine golf without it.  Bogeys, birdies, eagles, and the dreaded  other. Easy holes, tough holes, long holes and short holes, tournament setups, stableford competitions and leaderboards. Even the very nature of golf course architecture, and thus, the game itself, are all deeply affected by this simple, three-letter word: par.

We’ve all heard the cliché: defend the integrity of par. Yet as valuable as we believe par to be, we also know that beliefs must not be left unquestioned, and clichés are not always valuable. Over my years in golf, both as a player and golf course architect, I’ve come to doubt the importance of par. Let us remind ourselves, it is after all a fairly new concept in golf. According to the United States Golf Association (USGA), it was established just over 100 years ago by the writer A.H. Doleman when he wrote: ‘Base par on how the scratch players, as a mass of first-class players, score on the courses (44). This concept wasn’t commonly accepted until well into the twentieth century. Nonetheless, the way the concept of par is used and abused today is mostly a setback for the contemporary game. Indeed, what is par’s worth? Why is it necessary? Why do we place such importance on an arbitrary number? Hopefully this essay will encourage you to look beyond the more recent traditional values, to question this ostentatious notion of the integrity of par, and to ask if it should be adopted at all? Perhaps we should also reflect upon what it needs defending from. In essence, would golf be better off without par?

I’ll readily admit that par is useful for tournament golf in allowing us to keep track of who is leading and by how much, while the golfers are spread out over the entire layout. It is quite a simple system: Phil is at 4-under and Ernie 5-under, so Ernie is leading by one shot. However, that doesn’t mean it is a perfect system, or that another equally effective system could not be devised such as using the age-old concept of level fours, or even the field’s average score. Again, however, such a step would be unnecessary since par obviously works well enough in the tournament arena. Apart from tournament scoring, par is also desirable for certain golf games such as stableford competitions where points are awarded based on your score relative to par on each hole. And who among us hasn’t gone out alone one evening and played a casual game against Old Man Par? So while par certainly has its uses, these examples are, by and large, the extent of its worth. The omnipresence of par is far more pervasive and we have only ourselves to blame. We use it to judge anything from a course’s quality to a tournament’s historical significance.

However, without par, how would we know what to expect and what to shoot? How would we know how to play a hole? How would handicaps be calculated? How would we distinguish the easy courses from the true tests, the good rounds from the poor, and the worthy champions from the also-rans?

One of the misconceptions surrounding par is that it is necessary for handicap purposes. If this were true, I would be more than willing to defend par on that basis alone, since handicaps are a wonderful system of creating great, friendly matches between players of different abilities. However, in North America, it is not par but rather the course’s rating—comparable to the standard scratch score used by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club—and its slope that are used to calculate one’s handicap. The rating is what a scratch golfer should theoretically shoot for any given round—in effect what Doleman intended par to be—while the slope is an adjustment made to measure the challenges a course presents for the higher handicap golfers. These figures are unrelated to par and are, incidentally, a more accurate indication of a course’s so-called difficulty. Even the individual holes’ handicaps are unrelated to par. Indeed, they are not a measure of a hole’s difficulty, but rather of how challenging it would be for a higher handicap golfer to tie a lower handicap golfer on that one hole. This is why par-5s—seemingly easy holes—often have a low handicap rating. A scratch golfer could very well make a four, but his more erratic high-handicap friend would eventually miss a shot and make a six or seven. Conversely, on par-3s, the high-handicap player only needs to hit one good shot, or even a lucky shot, to beat the better player.

However, par’s most prevalent and unfortunately potent influence is when it is used as a starting point for design, and then as a criterion for judging architectural merit. Certain arbitrary and baseless design standards—such as a par of seventy-two—have been developed, leading us to needlessly repetitive designs. For while we pay lip service to creativity, the very freedom needed for the imagination to truly soar has been grounded by the self-imposed burden to conform. In anything intended for mass-consumption, from distinguished artwork to marketable product, the public is apprehensive when confronted by controversy and the unfamiliar. Non-standard has become sub-standard. For example, a course with a par of seventy-one, or one that features two par-5s in a row, is in the eyes of many, flawed, or at the very least, imperfect. The reason: it does not fit the accepted model. Yet rather than embracing the best golf course for a given site, including the features that make it unique, we have this pre-conceived idea of what we believe is the perfect, theoretical golf course, complete with proper—which is to say conformist—par sequence and hole lengths. The architect is then asked to try to find a way to fit this apparent ideal onto any piece of property, often no matter how awkward or unnatural the result, and often no matter how much earth must be moved, and sometimes with no regard for the vast sums of money required to achieve this end. Yet having a par-3 as the eighteenth hole, for example, is not a shortcoming, nor is it weak, unconventional, or controversial. It should not even be worth mentioning. It is even more upsetting to realise how many great holes have not been built because of par, simply because they wouldn’t have fitted the accepted par sequence.

Furthermore, apart from having the routing forced upon the land, the individual golf holes are themselves designed to fit their proposed par, rather than meld effortlessly into their surroundings.

It begins inconspicuously enough when certain hole-lengths (280 yards is common) are tactfully avoided, as they do not clearly fit into neat par compartments. Afterwards, a 465-yard par-5 to a large green is ridiculed as too easy, while a 465-yard par-4 with a bunker in front of the green is deemed unfair. So, at best, the par is changed, never without heated debate, under the peculiar reasoning that changing a virtual number would improve a hole, even though not a blade of grass has been moved. The hole simply exists: neither as long, short, tough nor easy. The only thing that changes is our perception. A rose by any other name, someone once famously wrote, would smell as sweet. This, one might presume, is entirely the wrong way to go about things, much like putting the carriage in front of the horse, and many classic golf courses have been defaced, their strategies nullified and features transformed, all in the name of defending par. One must look no further than the US Open, and in recent years, the British Open—particularly Carnoustie in 1999—to see this sad transformation of older layouts and the trickle-down effect it has on all our courses. The pursuit of difficulty—what is called tough but fair—has been a defining philosophy in tournament setups and golf course design: a short par-5 is renamed a par-4; fairways are narrowed; rough is grown; and greens are shaved and rolled. All this effort is made to create a more difficult golf course—a term which I believe is misleading. Difficulty is not an absolute, universal concept, but rather a relative one, a personal one, a measure of an individual’s ability against his goals. Thus the difficulty of a tournament is not in beating the course, but rather in beating the rest of the field. Your total score is secondary, as long as it is one less than your opponent’s. That is how worthy champions are identified. Par is entirely irrelevant.

Yet for all this compulsive, irrational obsession we have with par, golf is the only sport where such a concept even exists. There is no such thing in car racing, skiing, or cycling. The different stages of the Tour de France aren’t all the same length—not even close—and they don’t have a pre-determined completion time whose integrity needs to be protected. Some are longer, grueling marathons; others are shorter, flat-out sprints. The object remains to go as fast as you can, faster still than the next guy, who desperately wants to go faster than you.

Eliminate par, or at the very least ignore it, and you quickly realise that the challenge represented by each course, each hole, and each shot, is always present. If you believe a shot is too easy, you are not trying hard enough, or are not taking advantage of an opportunity to really hit one close. And if you feel a shot is too hard, you should find another way to play the hole or else embrace the challenge presented by the shot you’ve chosen to play.

Par does not—and should not—have any influence on shot selection. Still, it is remarkable how it exerts such an influence on a golfer’s thinking and strategy, even at the highest level. Professional golfers complain when a par-5 hole is changed to a par-4, crying ‘unfair’ because the green wasn’t designed to accept a long iron. And yet if it had remained as a par-5, those same golfers would have still been going for the green in two, and making birdie fours. Would Augusta National’s famous par-5 thirteenth hole be unfair if played as a par-4? Of course not! It would be the same hole, where making a four would be just as demanding, and making a six just as easy. And was the now feared par-4 seventeenth hole at St. Andrews too easy when it was a par-5 up until the 1950s? No, but perhaps it was deemed to be purely based on par. Fortunately in this case, only the par was changed, rather than replacing the Road Hole bunker with a pond for added difficulty. Either way, how difficult would these two holes be if they were simply two 485-yard holes, with no par attached? The golfer would then be asked to think rationally, playing the hole as they see fit, without bias or prejudice. In short: the way golf was meant to be.

Thus par is not a fundamental inviolable criterion, but rather a circumstantial and largely irrelevant outcome. It is neither an ingredient for difficulty nor a formula for quality. Par is merely a humble description, a label, a number, with regrettably far too great an influence on the game.

(44)  Doleman, A.H.  http://www.popeofslope.com/history/part2.html (accessed 13/3/2003)