I have a notebook in which, for some years, I have been writing down the holes I have played where the cart path forced me to leave the line of play. The count, as of last week, was three hundred and forty-one.
On every one of them, the architect — or, more often, the modern grounds committee — chose to pave a trench from green to next tee that did not follow the routing of the hole. The walker is asked to detour. The pace breaks. The rhythm breaks. Worst of all, the architect’s intended walk from the green, the small breath after the putt, the look back at the line you just played — that breath is gone.
A cart path is an admission that the course is no longer being designed for a person on foot. It is being designed for a person seated, with a cup-holder, with a roof, with a windscreen, and with eighteen holes of disconnected scenery between the tee shot and the putt. It is a different game.
A cart path is the moment the architect stopped designing for a person walking.
I am not against carts in principle. Some people cannot walk, and a course that excludes them is a course that has failed at one job. I am against the path. There is a perfectly good system, in use at most great courses in the British Isles and at every Three-Flag course in this Guide, where carts may be ridden on the fairway, on a rope-and-stake routing, and where no paved trench has ever been laid down. It works. It is quieter, cheaper, and visibly less damaging.
The cart path is the great quiet aesthetic crime of the post-war course — in Japan as much as anywhere else. The Guide will, in the meantime, give its Walking Award and its Three-Flag rating to courses that do not have one — or that have already torn theirs out.