I've been fascinated by all this discussion on reversible courses in the last couple of weeks. Apologies for joining the discussion after the excitement's died down, but other things kept me busy.
I played a Hale Irwin design near Driggs, ID (Teton Reserve, or was it Teton Reverse?) that was a reversible routing, so the concept is far from new. However, I expect TD and crew to make it work in a way that it likely hasn't in previous attempts.(In a positive way).
I checked out this course via Google Earth a while back--only because I had a look at the site while it was still in the permitting stage--and had no inkling that it was reversible. Today, I checked again and it's still hard to see. What's more interesting is that when I checked out both Dismal Red and Wolf Point the same way, I found parts of each course that looked as if they were designed to be reversible. (Comments on these threads do confirm that's not the case.)
Looking at the overhead of Teton Reserve does help justify the case against cart paths. Though, of course, even the Old Course has a cart path, so it can be done!
Read Tom Simpson's piece on it
Thanks, Frank. This is the most lucid and one of the most captivating pieces I've read in a long time. I'm going to be sure to read Simpson's book soon.
I did play The Old Course in reverse a few years back, when we took George Bahto over to Scotland before we started Old Macdonald. It doesn't work so well now, because they've stopped mowing the approaches into some greens as played in reverse; and it was clearly not nearly as interesting of a course playing down the left side. That will be the real challenge of this design, to get it where not everyone has thinks that clockwise is better than anti-clockwise [or vice versa 
].
It took quite a while before people began to prefer the modern routing of the Old Course to the clockwise one, right? It must be the case that, in addition to the playability problems created by mowing patterns in recent years, there have been subtler changes to TOC over the years that strengthen the counter-clockwise outing relative to the clockwise. For instance, whenever bunkers have been modified, the decisions about how exactly to build them must have reflected more about strategic play on the modern routing. To whatever extent greens and other contours were modified in the 20th century (I'm not knowledgeable about the entire history of changes to the course), these decisions must have also been made in the same way. And of course, we should remember that the tee boxes used today were not always there.
JB