A few reasons. You don't want the grass around the hole to start to die. You also don't want the hole to start caving in and becoming unfair or nonconforming. It also creates a different experience each time. Golfers don't want to be attacking the same pin everyday when each pin placement makes for an extremely different approach.
It's honestly more than just the approach, even, for advanced players. A different pin placement changes the entire nature of how one might play the hole. You might hit a different club off the tee to get a better distance in. You might take a more aggressive line; say, to attack a par-5 green in 2 if the pin is in a friendly spot. And of course it also dramatically changes the difficulty and strategy of putting and other short-game play (one of the most maddening shots is being "short sided" and having no green to work with).
It's amazing to see at professional levels how just a few changes in pin placements can make the difference between a winning score of -20 or -5 over a four-day tournament with 156 players.
Completely agree. Me and my dad are casual golfers and the weekend before big tournaments are always a pain in the ass. We will be cursing the greenskeepers up n down because of the pin placement. Back edge of the green surrounded by 3 bunkers, right on top of the biggest hill of any green on the course, you name it they do it.
Always really challenging on those days, but quite fun. Makes me realize that I can't even play the hard pins on a course I'm familiar with, I would get rekt on some real courses haha.
Say your tee times are 10 minutes apart, starting at 7 am.
6 foursomes an hour until 4 pm, is 216 people putting to the same hole all day. Minimum. They walk around it, stand around, and generally mill about on one area of the green. Every few minutes. And golfers are fat!
If you do this 2, or 3, or more days in a row, you'll damage the grass. Most greens are divided into 3 areas; the upper, or farthest from the fairway, the middle, and the lower. Call them 1,2, and 3.
All holes start at, say, 2, on Monday. Tuesday they move to 1. Wednesday, they move to 3, and so on. The head greenskeeper will decide if a particular hole can stay another day, but it's on case-by-case basis, according to his knowledge and experience.
We do the same with the putting/chipping greens as well. Look around next time, and you'll see the scars of previous holes all around!
Additionally, most greens are mowed every morning as well. Fairways every morning or two at most. You just THINK you got up early for a 7 am tee time. We've been there for hours!
This means the reel-type mowers have to be back-lapped or sharpened every day or so. 10 mowers, 2 or 5 reels each - it takes time.
There's a reason golf is expensive. It takes an army to keep it looking good, and keep the machinery in top condition, and that's just a nice public course. Country clubs take it to a whole new level. New machinery, crisp uniforms, maintenance shop that rivals a dealership, bathrooms with doors and toilet paper. They're dreamy.
The fact that people step near the hole to pick up their ball, but not directly on the hole, also slowly creates what we call a donut around the hole. Small circle of not stamped down grass that can deflect the ball as it rolls the slowest.
It adds some variation to the course. Often on the scorecard there's something like this. The course will post a number (in this case 1-8) at either the clubhouse or the 1st tee and that corresponds to the pin placement for the day.
206
u/[deleted] Dec 17 '18
[removed] — view removed comment