Stop playing the same tees every week – you’re missing out on a whole new golf course – National Club Golfer

For years I have been banging the drum for playing golf from further forward. Move up. Hit more wedges. Make some birdies. Golf is supposed to be enjoyable, isn’t it?

I still believe all of that. In fact, after playing more golf from forward tees this year than at any other point in my life, I probably believe it more strongly than ever. 

Much of that has been because I have played so often with my son. We naturally gravitate towards the shorter tees and, rather than disappearing back to my usual markers, I tend to stay with him. 

It is wonderful. I’ll hit irons from tees where normally I would hit driver. Occasionally, vanity gets the better of me and I will try to drive a green, generally accompanied by an announcement about what is about to happen and, rather less frequently, by the promised result. 

At classic courses, the forward tees are often much closer to the ground from which the course was originally intended to be played. Before another 400, 600 or 1,000 yards were gradually bolted onto it, there was a routing with a rhythm of its own. You fall from green to tee. This pleases me more than is reasonable. 

Nothing irritates me quite like finishing a hole and discovering the championship tee is another 80 yards back, often at a worse angle and in the direction from which I have just come. Golf architecture should propel you around a landscape, not send you on a series of small administrative errands. 

Moving forward also makes you see a familiar course differently. Bunkers that had become decorative return to the centre of your decision-making. Greens reveal entrances you had stopped noticing. One hole becomes driveable. Another demands a positional iron rather than driver. You begin seeing the course again. 

All of which made my recent visit to Dumbarnie slightly uncomfortable. For a YouTube experiment, I was playing the course from around 7,600 yards. The ground was firm, there was a proper links breeze blowing and, before we started, I was dreading it. 

This, surely, was everything I had spent years telling people not to do. 

But I absolutely loved it. 

There was an exhilaration in standing on tees I would normally shake my head at from 100 yards away. Suddenly carries mattered. A good drive wasn’t merely helpful; it was required. Holes which had always felt generous became examinations. Pars felt different. Birdies felt genuinely significant.

 And, perhaps most interestingly, it was playable. Not easy. Certainly not sensible as an everyday exercise. But playable. 

I rediscovered something we all repeatedly forget: golf begins again when you reach the green. 

You can hit a 3-wood into a par 4, rather than a 7-iron, and still make par. You can miss a green from 190 yards and get up and down. Equally, you can hit a perfect drive and wedge and make six. Length changes the questions. It does not remove the importance of answering the ones around the green.

What Dumbarnie really did was make me reconsider the entire argument about which tees we should play. 

Perhaps we are asking the wrong question. Rather than, ‘which are the correct tees?’, perhaps we should be asking, ‘why do we keep playing the same ones?’ 

Most golf courses give us three, four or sometimes five sets of markers. Yet many of us decide at some point that one colour belongs to us and then play from it forever. 

Which is slightly absurd. 

Play from the front and par fives become tempting in two, short fours invite aggression and hazards appear in unfamiliar places. Move back and trajectory matters more, carries become significant and long irons and fairway woods that rarely leave the bag finally have something useful to do. 

Better still, mix them. Play the back tee where length creates an interesting challenge and move forward where another tee creates a better angle. Play one nine forward and one back. Create a composite course. 

We spend fortunes travelling around the world looking for new golf experiences while repeatedly playing our own course from exactly the same patch of grass.

So after all those years of telling everyone to move forward, perhaps I need to amend the message. 

Sometimes move forward. Sometimes move back. 

Just don’t stand in the same place every Saturday for the rest of your life. There is another golf course sitting right there waiting for you.

Now have your say

What do you think? Are you flexible when it comes to the tees you will play golf from? Or will you always test yourself to the limit? Let us know in the comments, or get in touch on X.

NOW READ: Golf needs more short courses. And St Enodoc shows us why

NOW READ: Why golf courses shouldn’t be designed to punish you