I Was Wrong About One Old Course Change...

In Adam Lawrence's tour with R&A Chief Executive Architect Peter Dawson, there was commentary about the addition of greenside bunkers to the second hole. I have felt this was the most egregious defacing of the Old Course because taking a nice spot to play safe threatened to tamper with one of the game's most amazing green complexes.

Lawrence writes:

We began our tour on the second hole, where two pot bunkers have been added at the front right of the green, and two old bunkers, dating from between 1905-1932, and positioned around thirty yards from the green, have been filled in, and the area behind the new bunkers, to the right of the green, has been gently contoured to make recovery shots from that side a little more difficult. “Those areas were completely flat, and we're certain they had been levelled at some point in the past, perhaps for the construction of a tee. The same is true on some of the other holes where we plan to add contour by the side of the greens,” said Dawson.

I felt the addition of these bunkers was merely a ploy to hide a hole location during the Open to induce more pars and bogies. Lawrence explains:

When the pin is placed on the right side of the green – which it has not been in previous Opens, though it is a common position for daily play – the best line of approach will be from the centre left of the fairway, near to Cheape's bunker, he believes. The remarkable set of contours in front of the green mean that a player who drives up the right could still bank his approach off the slopes and into the pin, but the shot will be extremely difficult. Even from the preferred angle, the opening is narrow.

He's right. If you look at the middle photo posted on Golf Digest's Tumblr account (above) and taken by Matthew Harris, you'll see that the bunkers do not eat into the green complex in a way that will bother the modern professional as I'd feared. Furthermore, we know today's players would rather play a pro-am round lefthanded than hit a run-up shot. And since they all hit lofted shots with great precision, even under firm conditions a normal shot will likely leave them a 25-footer coming back to the hole.

However, these new greenside bunkers added by Dawson and longtime associate Martin Hawtree will almost definitely make the hole harder for everyday green-fee paying golfers. The bunkers will reduce the number of opportunities to avoid the huge leftside contours by playing a safe second shot, therefore adding much needed length to the round and even some unexpected misery that previous generations had not had the privilege of experiencing. 

Maybe when all of flying sand from bunker shots builds up after years of hackers flailing away, the hoped-for effect of a tough tournament hole location will be achieved for those precious four days every five years. More important, this change will help add to the struggles of the people who play the course on a daily basis and just maybe--fingers crossed--ensure rounds are even slower.

So I apologize for getting this one wrong!

Here's a view from the grandstand behind the green during 2010 Open practice rounds showing how badly this green needed to be protected from the onslaught of lazy second shots by everyday hackers:

There have been a couple of good threads about the second hole on Golf Club Atlas, here and this one here started by Bob Crosby about the difficulty of this hole in past Opens.

R&A Chief Architect Dawson: Anchoring Ban Distracted Us From Announcing Most Extensive Old Course Changes In A Century

Adam Lawrence previews a more extensive story he has coming in Golf Architecture following a tour of the controversial renovations with R&A architect Peter Dawson. Apparently, Martin Hawtree is using this time to renovate the Old Course...to be somewhere else. His hands-on attention to detail is quite impressive is it not?

Anyway, seat belts on. It's cringeworthy time...

But, though he acknowledges the communication of the works could have been handled better – “We were perhaps a little distracted by the announcement of the ban on anchoring”

Whoa, whoa, whoa...this renovation was in the works for seven months! It involves the most historic course on the planet and the R&A Chief was distracted by the anchoring ban?

On a serious note, if you are too distracted to publicly share the master plan, the Photoshopped images simulating the proposed changes and from sharing a basic notice to the golfers in town of planned changes as you did in 2009 with the Jubilee Course, are you maybe a little too distracted to be implementing architectural changes to the oldest and most cherished venue in the world of sport?

Anyway, before I interrupted...

Dawson is firm in his belief that the works will improve the course, both for day to day play and in championship mode, and that, far from being untouched for hundreds of years, the course has repeatedly been changed, though he agrees that the current works are the biggest in a century.

A century! Well at least he knows his place in history.

Again, the biggest changes in a hundred years earned a Friday news dump press release followed by work on a Monday morning.

And, although he is happy to confirm that the impetus from the works came from the R&A's Championship Committee, he is at pains to explain that toughening the course for the professionals is not the sole goal of the works. Of the filling up of the hollow in the middle of the seventh fairway, he said: “That is something the Links Trust has been keen to do for many years. It collected so many balls, and was thus so full of divots that it had to be roped off and played as ground under repair for a large part of the year, which was a bit of an embarrassment.”

Now, in the old days, so the legend goes, when divots or rabbits burrowed, they often evolved into bunkers? Robert Hunter wrote lovingly about this in The Links (note to Peter and Martin: it's a book on golf architecture, you might enjoy it.)

So wouldn't a more historically accurate change have been to put a bunker in this 7th fairway hollow? Just saying...

Dawson talks at length--because Hawtree was apparently busy with a more pressing project--about the second hole changes, but that'll have to be in a separate post. (I know you can't wait.)

This is just mind-boggling:

On the fourth hole, the low dune formation that creates the left edge of the fairway in the drive zone is planned to be reduced next winter. “Personally I am not sure about that change, and I'm glad it isn't in the first phase, so we have more chance to think about it,” said Dawson.

The architect doesn't even like his own changes.

“The impetus has come from the greenkeepers – it was covered in rough during the 2005 Open, and the result was that almost nobody tried to hit their drive up the right. To create more width, we shaved the bank down in 2010, but it is very steep, and the greens staff have difficulty mowing it at that height.”

I'm just going to ignore the depressing notion that the greenkeepers are making suggestions related to strategy, and try to figure out which mound, excuse me, "acute spur formation," is under attack here. Dawson seems to first be talking about the large leftside grassy mound (pictured below), but how its height would discourage someone from driving down the gorse-lined right side is beyond me. I'm going with the gorse being the problem in that case.

Your honor, I submit to you a photo from 2010:

4th hole center fairway view (click to enlarge)Then he's talking about the bump short of the green, which I take to be the acute spur formation that the maintenance crew can't mow. Your honor, I submit...

Pretty amazing after 400 years, and "before mowers were properly invented," that this bump was able to be cut. Maybe those modern mowers aren't that proper after all?

I thought this was a stretch regarding the 11th green:

“That pin is only used in winter at the moment,” said Dawson. “It's not just a question of being unusable at Open speeds – it can't be used even when the greens are at normal summer pace. The green would have to be slowed to six or seven on the Stimpmeter to make that pin usable.”

So the greens slow down four to five feet on the Stimpmeter during winter?

And it seems they are accentuating a feature on the Road hole, because that 4.6 scoring average last time wasn't enough.

Lawrence writes:

The widening to the right is frankly relatively uncontroversial – it will now gather shots from slightly further out. To my eye more surprising is the addition of a slight gathering contour on the left side of the bunker, presumably to make the shot to the back left of the green – a route popularised in the 1990s by Nick Faldo – more challenging. This looks fine from the fairway, but from the eighteenth tee, a slight mound can be seen, which appears a little out of place.

Eh no one will notice. It's just the Road hole!

Meanwhile, Graylyn Loomis posted some high quality images of the work in progress.

Man On The (St. Andrews) Street: It Had To Be Done!

Alan Bastable talks to the man on the street in St. Andrews (by phone) and two themes emerge:

(A) few people knew changes to the most revered public course on the planet were about to be made and...

(B) too many people of St. Andrews live in a bubble free of actual information or apparent awareness of what they have.

First, the lack of transparency issue, talking to local golf shop manager Andrew Donaldson:

"A lot of people like me didn't really hear about it until the last minute," he said. "You see, the golf courses here are all public, so they're owned by the public, basically. They're counsel courses, so there should be a public consultation before anything major happens — that's how most people would feel. And there really hasn't been. It seems they just bypassed the public, who have the right to walk on the course, whether they play golf or not."

An innkeeper in town who has been playing the Old Course for 30 years, but who asked to remain anonymous for fear of upsetting his friends and associates, corroborated Donaldson's account. "There was no public consultation at all," he said. "They just did it. But that's life and you get on with it." (Peter Dawson, the R&A chief executive, told the BBC this week that the alterations were, in fact, roundly embraced by the townspeople.)

By the way, the R&A still has not released the Photoshopped images that were put out on the Old Course grounds showing the proposed changes.

This next part is where you start to worry about what the townspeople genuinely understand the sacred ground they've inherited.

Same anonymous shopkeeper:

"If you want to talk about tradition, there was not one single piece of gorse on the Old Course going back 30 years, yet there's gorse there now," he said. "And now they're complaining about the gorse going away."

Anyone see complaints about gorse going away? Actually most of those upset about the changes would hail that move! But it'll never happen for the same reason we are in the mess we're in: some people don't like low scores and will go to amazing lengths to prevent them.

And there was this from Emily Griffiths, captain of the ladies golf team at the University of St. Andrews:

"Typically the R&A are criticized for being stuck in their ways," says Griffiths, who is also president of the St. Andrews Athletic Union, "and now they're doing something which is moving with the times and they're getting complaints the other way."

Uh, that's because (A) the only people who see the times as having passed the Old Course are those charged with protecting the game and (B) not to be repetitive, but no one was crying out for this upgrade. No one! Nada! Zilch! Which brings us to Niall Scott, a St. Andrews University employee:

"A lot of the golfing press was full of articles about the fact that the Old Lady had become too easy," Scott said. "They were honestly asking the question, Was it appropriate to play the Open at the Old Course anymore? The Links Trust, I think, responded very thoughtfully to that."

If anyone has a link to the golfing press calling the Old Course outdated and inappropriate for The Open, I'd love to read the stories!

Anchoring Ban Continues To Highlight The Distance Issue

I'm beginning to think the anchoring ban was a clever ploy by the governing bodies to unlock previously muted opinions on the distance issue!

Royal and Ancient Golf Club member Michael Bamberger is the latest to note the Old Course changes with little enthusiasm but says "the real problem is that the R&A/USGA have consistently lacked a 'staff futurist' to anticipate how various issues would spiral."

The R&USGA should be focused on how to make courses far shorter and easier to maintain. As modern layouts approach 8,000 yards, maintenance becomes incredibly expensive (a cost that's passed on to golfers), and the courses become excessively punitive and excruciating slow.

So, where to start? Brown, for starters, should truly be the new green. Augusta National, ridiculously verdant, sets a terrible example in this regard.

But where the governing bodies absolutely blew it was by allowing big-headed titanium drivers almost 20 years ago. It's because Dustin Johnson can use modern weaponry to drive the ball 370 yards that the Old Course is getting these pointless renovations.

And add him to the bifurcation camp.

The modern ball, coming off the face of the modern driver, flies way too far for golfers on TV trying to break 60. But it doesn't for us, shooting our newspaper 89s. The solution is two sets of rules. Rory and Co. should have a ball they can call their own. Bifurcation. That's the word they don't want us to use.

An unbylined FayObserver.com story talks to club pros and everyday golfers. Guess what, they are saying the same thing.

"I think it's kind of dumb," said pro golfer Chip Lynn of Lillington. "There's a lot of other stuff that they could ban that affects the game more."

Lynn is a former Fayetteville State golfer who now plays on the Egolf Tour and got through the first round of PGA Tour qualifying this year. He said he tried a belly putter in "six or seven events" this year and found it didn't help him.

"I didn't putt any better," he said. "I don't think the belly putter gives you that much more advantage. I didn't notice anything different. My putts weren't better during the round."

Lynn said technology has affected the game more than anchored putters.

"I agree with Webb Simpson who said there are a lot more things that have affected the game than just the belly putter," he said. "I don't think it's that big of a deal.

"If you're going to change that rule, you probably need to do something about the balls, the driver heads and the technology that has really affected the game instead of the belly putters."

 And Adam Scott continued to press his case on this theme Wednesday, asking for some consistency from the governing bodies

Maybe, just maybe, all of this crying out for a distance solution was part of the plan to start with when the anchoring ban came about? I know, they aren't that clever. But the unintended consequences of screwing with the Old Course and moving first on anchoring could ultimately work out in the favor of the governing bodies.

Update on 2012-12-06 15:47 by Geoff

**Thanks to reader PMDF6 for this Frank Deford NPR commentary on the same theme. The link includes an audio version of DeFord reading it.

Now understand, modern golfers have kryptonite drivers with club heads as large as prize pumpkins, and steroid balls that would not pass the drug test, even if the hapless International Cycling Union were doing the random sampling.

Golfers are slugging the dimpled rockets so far that all sorts of classic courses have had to be lengthened — even the sacred Old Course at St. Andrews. This is like if baseball bats and balls had been supercharged so much that Bud Selig decreed that now it had to be 100 feet instead of 90 between bases.

But never mind the bazooka transcontinental drives. No. The golf honchos have issues with the little itty-bitty part of the game called putting. If the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient were in charge of nuclear proliferation, they would handle things by legislating the size of bayonets.

"Golf’s shrine has been desecrated in an act of staggering arrogance by those meant to care for it."

All of the change-equals-progress bandwagon jumpers are on board with the R&A and St. Andrews Links Trust, but in preaching that mindless case I notice no one addresses how this wonderful progress was ushered through secretly.

As John Huggan notes in his Scotland on Sunday column, the R&A is merely arrogant, but it's the Links Trust that failed most miserably.

Yes, it is true that the R&A and Links Trust consulted with five local clubs. But those clubs, being private, are merely stakeholders who do not own the links. Instead, the proposals should have been revealed to both the people of St Andrews and, surely, golfers all around the world. Had that been the case, it is clear from the general reaction across the globe that none of the digging and scraping currently defacing the Old Course would be taking place.

So if this is indeed progress, undoing Mother Nature's beloved handiwork, why keep it a secret until a little over two days before you break the sacred grounds of the Old Course?

Latest #savetheoldcourse Clippings And More Graphic Images

Joining former five time Open Champion and Royal & Ancient Golf Club member Peter Thomson in criticizing the work is Paul Lawrie, the 1999 Open winner and a Scot.

Martin Dempster reports his extensive statements as well as some of the other recent jabs from playing greats, including this from Lawrie:

“I personally feel it should be left alone and, if twenty-under or less wins, then so be it as all links courses are at the mercy of the weather. No matter what the winner scores, he’s still the best player that week.”

Lawrie, who described a new tee built at the 17th for the 2010 Open as looking “out of place”, added: “I personally feel they should be tackling technology and, more importantly, the ball instead of spending fortunes changing courses.”

Luke Donald, the world No. 2 Tweeted that he's not sure he's in favor of changing Old Course features that survived several hundred years.

Lorne Rubenstein was more restrained than others but certainly clear about what he feels is driving the course changes.

Change the rules for equipment. Change the golf ball. Slow down greens. (None of this will happen, though). But don’t change the Old Course, at least not without input from more people who care. And many do.

Joe Passov sets the bar disturbingly low, suggesting that changing the Old Course is no big deal and not fazing him "one bit" because they've always changed the Old Course. Though that's a tough case to make post-1920 other than the new tees prior to 2010. And also a stretch considering that the people making the change could have regulated equipment so that this would not be necessary.

That's because for all of its tradition and role as the most hallowed ground in the sport, the Old Course is also all about change. It has witnessed -- and mostly embraced -- hundreds of modifications over the past several centuries. The latest refinements will ultimately make little difference in how the Old Course at St. Andrews is played and enjoyed.

Obviously I can't agree with a statement like that when greenside bunkers are going to be added to create inaccessible hole locations to get Open scores up. Those bunkers will take away the ground game or a bailout for the everyday golfer. But the larger question I'd ask those like Passov chalking these changes up to the Old Course's normal progress: if this is just a typical Old Course update, why was it done in secret?

Reader Mark points out that in 2009 the Links Trust announced "adaptations" to the Jubilee Course. When this took place, they made head greenkeeper Gordon Moir available for meetings on four separate days and displayed the plans from June 8-22 in the Links Clubhouse. This did not happen in the case of the Old Course, the most revered and beloved course on the planet, the bible of golf design. Either it was an oversight of epic proportions or someone knew that these changes went way beyond the last significant nips and tucks the course experienced prior to the 1920s. You can view a PDF of the Jubilee campaign here.

Golf Channel's Morning Drive had Jack Nicklaus on to react to the anchoring ban, but he was also asked about the state of the game (taking care of the ball would help) and the Old Course (nothing wrong with keeping it up with modern times.)

 

Jim Colton tweeted a blow up shot by Graylin Loomis of the amazing scene of a 7th fairway depression getting filled in by an army of workers who were also offering us a punchline contest: how many men does it take to fill in a feature that had been around for several centuries until today?

Generations saw fit to leave this depression. Today's caretakers did not. It must be a gift to know what Old Tom and Allan Robertson and all of the other Old Course caretakers did not know!

Loomis, on the Living as a Links Golfer blog, posted more images here showing the work in process. Warning, these images are explicit and may cause recurring nightmares if you have a golfing soul. Oh, and good luck finding the architects in the photos. Hawtree no where to be seen and Peter Dawson was in Orlando. Nothing like that hand-on supervision for the Old Course account.