Thursday Threads

For those whose eyes glaze over when the talk turns architectural, today's post might not be for you....

There's No Such Thing as Too Rich or Too Narrow - But too wide...yes, that's most certainly a thing.  Especially after last year's experience at Erin Hills....

History lesson:  Who remembers the Massacre at Winged Foot?  The year was 1974 and the players arrived to find a golf course designed to leave them curled up in the corner in the fetal position....  The prior year, Johnny Miller had torched venerable Oakmont for a Sunday 63, leaving us to ponder whether the Winged Foot set-up was just coincidental...  Shockingly, Unplayable Lies does not believe in coincidences....

So, what might the USGA do at equally venerable Shinnecock Hills?

At Shinnecock Hills, the staff was presented with the equivalent of the bar exam, having been asked by the U.S. Golf Association last year to remove wide swaths of fairway

grass on 14 holes and roll in thousands of yards of fescue rough. In the USGA’s estimation, the venerable club in Southampton passed with flying colors. 

“They did it almost overnight,” said Mike Davis, CEO of the USGA. “As someone at the club said, it was like a military exercise. When all is said and done, it looks tremendous. It fits your eye because these are the appropriate grasses.”

Fair enough, but today's architects are all about width off the tee, no?

“Some of the fairways had gone to 60 yards wide. It was great fun to play,” Davis said, adding that the average width had been 26 yards in 2004. “What we’ve done is come back and say, ‘You know what? You’re going to have to tighten it up some because accuracy is part of the test.’ ”

Mike, thank God you got there in time.  We can't have folks having fun on their club's golf course, can we?  Once that crap starts, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle.

Interestingly, the writer elides a material fact, to wit, that the club had widened those fairways as part of a Coore-Crenshaw master plan to return to the original design concepts of William Flynn.

And get this little bit of misdirection:

Making golfers try to avoid the rough is part of the new, and old, tactical philosophy at Shinnecock. Davis said that the membership has made a major effort in recent years to restore the feel of the course that architect William Flynn built in the late 1920s, after Suffolk County extended Sunrise Highway through the layout that had hosted the 1896 U.S. Open. 

Jennings said, “William Flynn’s architectural design is based on angles: hitting angles off the tee into the fairway and then off the fairway into the green. The work by Mike and the USGA, where we brought the fairways in, really accentuated the angles and makes them more robust. It brings features back into play that might have been lost in the modern game, based on how long people are hitting the golf ball these days.

Yes, Mike, and that "feel" never included narrow ribbons of fairways.... Jennings, by the way, is club superintendent Jon Jennings, who believes that narrow fairways accentuate playing angles....  Only in the sense that they make every golfer play the same angle.  That Kool-Aid tastes so awfully good going down...  Next thing we know, someone will make the case that in order to hit these narrow fairways the guys will be going back to smaller clubheads and higher-spin balls.  

I'll try to limit the preachiness, but this is where we see the effects of modern technology, as Mike Davis has essentially told us that Shinnecock Hills is obsolete.  What's being done to Shinny is merely bifurcation y another name.....

One feels for the club's members, because this project, its military precision aside, has rendered the golf course unplayable for mere mortals.  They belong to Shinny so there are limits to the amount of compassion, but one assumes that this wasn't discussed as part of the agreement with the USGA.

The risk, of course, is the wind..... Davis was no doubt concerned that if it remains calm, the guys would chew the place up.  The R & A, in contrast, seems far less concerned, understanding that in the absence of their seaside course's primary defense, that these guys are good live under par.

Geoff had this in his post on the subject:

As absurd as all of this is to theoretically protect "accuracy", the real issue remains huge distance gains passing by the governing bodies. If the professional game were in balance, the width could be tolerated thanks to the green complexes serving as the defense. Angles would matter. A form of accuracy would be rewarded. Just not this year at Shinnecock. Again.

He's taken to using the concept of "balance", which I'm not sure quite communicates his concerns.  But when a track like Shinny needs to be essentially blown up for the elite men professionals, that should have red flashing lights and sirens blaring for anyone concerned about the game.

Take the Fifth - The subject, of course, being the fifth at Augusta National Golf Club.  Yanno, the place that hosts that little invitational every April....  We've known for some time that their fifth will undergo the knife soon, here's the question golf nerds are asking themselves:

Can Augusta National Get The MacKenzie And Jones Back In Their 5th Hole?

Believe it or not, the inspiration for the fifth was.... wait for it, the Road Hole. here is George Cobb's 1960 rendering of the hole. 

As compared to the hole today:

The original design concept was that those challenging the left side of the hole off the tee would be rewarded with a better angle into the green, assuming the carried the bunkers and didn't stray too far left.  Note also the mounding that Cobb shows, that affects the sight lines of thos etaking the safer line to the right.  Classic risk-reward options for the player...

The current configuration of the hole takes the interest out of the tee shot, as everyone lays up short of the bunkers... Don't get the linkage to Road, perhaps the Good Doctor can explain better than your humble blogger:

Yeah, you remember MacKenzie, the guy that Brandel Chamblee blames for ruining our game....

So, the club has acquired the land at the bottom of the aerial photo above, and can reroute Old Berkman's Road to push back the tee.  Most folks are fine with that, in concept, since No. 5 was always meant to be one of the tougher pars out there.  The issue is that it will be difficult to recreate the right-to-left angle of the hole, as that would entail playing directly over the fourth green.

H/T to The Forecaddie and Shack, whose posts I've plagiarized paraphrased above.  Keep up the good work, lads.

Rory, Obsessed - This will be of little surprise, though his wording seems injudicious.  Curmudgeonly James Corrigan scores a sitdown with the Ulsterman, in which he admits to a post-Masters funk:

It might be an interesting conversation the next time Rory McIlroy bumps into the R&A hierarchy. The Ulsterman has declared the Masters as “the biggest tournament in the world and I'm comfortable saying that”, relegating The Open to the lower rungs of the podium. 

"The Masters has now become the biggest golf tournament in the world and I'm comfortable saying that," he said. "I don't care about the US Open or The Open, it is the biggest golf tournament in the world, the most amount of eyeballs, the most amount of hype, everything is at Augusta. For me it's the most special tournament that we play and it's the one everyone desperately wants to win."

You see the issue....  It's fine for him to be obsessed with the Masters, his need to top off the career slam and atone for 2011's meltdown.

It's the attribution to others that will have the R & A and others a tad hot under the collar, and I suspect he'll get some quiet pushback.  Or perhaps not so quiet....

Alan, Asked - This is merely a good week of the mailbag feature, but there's always fun to be found.  This is easily my fave:

Golf announcer cliches...What do they mean by "He's a good ball striker"? Is it just that he's an average player with no particular strengths, and they are fumbling for something good to say? #AskAlan -@daver40

It means he's a crappy putter.

Exactly.

I think he misses the point here:

Question with underlying preachy opinion: Doesn't the alternate shot format during @Zurich_Classic help prepare us for the Ryder Cup since this has been a traditional weakness? -Mac (@beerpilot) 

By "us" do you mean American players? When it comes to the Ryder Cup, there is no we or us for me — I'm an impartial observer traveling on no passport. But for sure getting to play alternate shot (and better-ball) with tournament pressure can only help U.S. Ryder Cuppers. It's easy to imagine Billy Horschel being on the bubble for a captain's pick and this victory is exactly the kind of thing that could tip the scales. Personally, I'd *love* to see Scott Piercy on the U.S. team. Dude is a birdie machine who loves action, and his palpable cockiness would drive the Euros batty.

Misconceptions abound.  First, folks seem to think that the Euros play a lot of alternate shot growing up, which really isn't the case.  Secondly, the Yanks haven't been terrible at foursomes, or at not until very recently...

Equally important, thew Zurich field had almost as many potential Euro Ryder Cup players as American.  So yes, one assumes that more experience with the format helps but, whatever its affects, the Euros are in on it with our guys.

Why don't pro events drive the golfers to their drives on some/all holes to speed play for TV? -@JuddOrrell

For one thing, it would destroy the rhythm of their round. The players have spent a lifetime learning to calibrate their thinking and breathing to the minutes in between shots. To suddenly speed them to the ball would be a radical change. More importantly, it would kill the spectating experience. Following one group for 18 holes is a pleasure that would be rendered impossible if the players get zipped around in carts.

I'm old enough to remember when tees were placed close to greens to avoid such a necessity....

#AskAlan Who does Tiger play with in Paris, and how many times does he play? -@JeremyBenson 

He plays with whomever he wants! But given the wear and tear on his brittle body, Tiger might play only three matches. Four would be the absolute maximum. If he's still defensive and inconsistent with the driver that would mean he'd likely play both fourball sessions. If Tiger starts swinging the big stick better he'd be a weapon in foursomes, given his shotmaking abilities and the fine scrambling we've seen so far this year. Kuchar is his most likely partner in either format, but Kooch isn't a lock to make the team. As vice captain at previous Cups, Tiger bonded with both Reed and Spieth, and no doubt he'd love to be paired with either of them, if Capt. Furyk is willing to break up one of his strongest teams. Both Rickie and JT are a little soft for Tiger, temperament-wise, but he plays plenty of golf with them already in South Florida, so they're strong candidates, too. How the mild-mannered Furyk handles a living legend like Tiger is going to be a fascinating subplot at this Ryder Cup.

Yanno who else isn't a mortal lock to be playing in Paris?  yeah, that Tiger guy.... It is interesting speculation though, so I'm going to suggest that in light of the blooming bromance, the obvious answer is to pair him with Phil.  Hal Sutton wasn't wrong, he was just early.....

And this should be asked of all of us:

How are you "Living Under Par" today? -Kevin (@KCrouch05) 

Well, this afternoon I enjoyed a 2-putt birdie on the par-5 14th hole at Quail Lodge in Carmel Valley — does that count?

And I lived under par on our 14th hole yesterday, which wasn't sufficient to avoid handing Bobby D. that fiver back on the 18th green.  But the suits in Ponte Vedra Beach should be warned, when you've lost KCrouch05, you've lost the country.