A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

The last thing your humble blogger needs is another golf website in which to waste hours of his time, so Damn You, Shackelford!  

The source of this opprobrium towards my favorite blogger is this post, in which he introduces us to a fascinating website called GolfCourseHistories.com, which compiles aerial photographs of significant golf courses from which one can see how the courses evolve over time.

Geoff's post was his final word on the profound changes to TPC Sawgrass, readily apparent in these side-by-side photos:

TPC Sawgrass in 1980 (top) and 2012 (bottom).

Obviously Pete Dye's original concept was for the areas outside the normal playing corridors to be sandy waste areas, a visually starker contrast.  Shack has expressed hope that the PGA will "Pinehurst" the course, returning it to what he calls its Jack Sparrow look, though he concedes that's unlikely to happen under Commissioner Monk Ratched.  And given that the geographic context is Florida, aren't sandy waste areas far more interesting (not to mention visually distinctive) than spongy Bermuda rough?

Let's look at another example, one that Shack blogged on extensively during the 2010 U.S. Open.  Regular readers will know that I'm not the biggest Pebble Beach fan in the world, provocatively calling it the most overrated golf course on the planet.  It's admittedly got some great holes, especially sequence of Nos. 5 (the new fifth) through 10 along the ocean.

But I thought the 2010 Open was most unfortunate, as the greens on Nos. 14 and 17 were insufficient to the task (my exact words were something like "they need to blow up two greens before they award it another Open").  In dealing with the latter, the best players in the world simply couldn't hold the green with the club required to reach it, at the firmness of a U.S. Open set-up.  To my mind, that's not a U.S. Open-worthy challenge, and as a result most players deliberately dumped their tee-shots in the front bunker, from which they hoped to make three but assured no worse than a four.

So, how did this come to be?  Take a look as these aerials:

The 17th green at Pebble, in 1938 and 2013.

Notice how the back section of the hourglass-shaped green has shrunk significantly?  What's actually happened is that the front bunker has grown from the sand deposited by players' shots between the bunker and the green over.  These changes happen so slowly they are imperceptible to the eye, but one can speculate how many over the decades have found themselves flailing away in that front bunker.

It's a great website with much to explore.  Each of the photos is presented with a "handle" to drag across the image to transform it from the older to newer (or visa versa) image.