Golf World Monday On Lytham

My Golf World Monday item reviewing the week at Royal Lytham and St. Annes.

No matter how you felt about the course (very good) or the setup (dismal), there is no question the greenkeeping staff worked miracles to make the course as playable and good as it was considering the lovely England summer.

Just a note about the setup. This is a wonderful course which needs more width to be interesting. Moving a few tees around to compensate for the lack of wind would have helped too, and maybe not tucking every hole location or sticking them on strange spots would have been nice too. I just hope they start widening it out and turning some sheep loose on the roughs, because I can't imagine an average golfer 10 handicapper breaking 100 at Lytham as it was setup this year.

Update on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 at 12:10 PM by Geoff

**I see Alan Shipnuck agreed with me in his SI Confidential assessment.

Shipnuck: It was boring, defensive golf, but that's not Lytham's fault, it's the R&A's. Equipment has rendered these old links, with their fast fairways, totally obsolete. Just like the USGA's failures turned Olympic into a boring slog. Augusta National and Bethpage and Oakmont are probably the only major venues where driver must be hit, and it's the club that demands the most skill and helps identify the best player. To have guys hitting 6-irons off the tee is an incomplete examination.

And...

Shipnuck: To protect Lytham, the R&A resorted to a bunch of hokey pin placements, and that ridiculous, unplayable rough, which negates shotmaking. Links courses are supposed to be wide-open canvases that encourage shotmaking and different angles of attack, not tight, penal, claustrophobic courses that force every competitor to play from the same spot.

And...

Shipnuck: Just to hammer the point home, the speed of the fairways made Lytham play about 6,400 yards, maybe less. To actually force the modern golfer to have a few proper three-shot par-5s and hit mid- to long-irons into a handful of par-4s, a course needs to be 8,500 yards, maybe longer. I'm completely serious. The USGA and R&A have failed the game, and it is becoming increasingly obvious as one major championship venue after another forces a bastardized kind of pitch-and-putt golf.

Comments

[Ardmoreari]

Geoff,

Why do golf tournament organizers feel or think they are qualified to run a tournament and do course set up? Is Mike Davis a golf course architecht or superintendent? Does the R&A employ an expert in determining how to set up their courses for The Open? It seems like you have a real grasp for this kind of stuff (blending architecture and how to set up a course for a major championship) but the last two majors have played out from a course standpoint very awkwardly. Can you please find a way to insert yourself before the PGA?

[Easingwold]

What was wrong with the set up ? It was fine. Conditions were easy until the last day when players like Woods were scared to hit driver. Notice how Ernie hit driver on the last ? I bet Scott wishes he did now. Interesting ? It had more interest that the US Open and PGA combined. Bunkers were hazards for a change. It's the best tournament in the world, bar none.

[dbh]

Stellar coverage as always, Geoff, thank you.
Unlike many who have posted in earlier threads, I really liked the course. 9 is a blast! 11, 16, 18....
Maybe it was those aerial views...pretty cool when a golf course is nestled in the middle of everyday life.
Re. the setup, that's tough to tell watching on TV, I'd defer to anyone actually on the ground about that.
I might not break 100 on Olympic or Lytham, but give me Lytham any day. At least I'd enjoy myself trying.

[KS]

The rough would be much thinner without the record rain. Granted, they could mow it out much farther, but the thickness of that type of turf is almost always directly related to the amount of rain received.

[elf]

Interesting thing I started thinking about after Adam's 3 wood misadventure on 18, so I asked a few people who were there, apparently Lytham was lethal to 3woods, they brought all the trouble into play. So you were left with two options, hit driver over, or iron short.

Adam and Ernie hit driver ridiculously well all week, but the most accurate of the long hitters, hit the frwy barely more than 50% of the time with driver (and that's on more generous tour fairways).. Maybe that's why the top 10 only featured 4 longer guys (and Colesarts got there by playing before the wind on Sunday) and one of them (Woods) just refused to hit driver. While Rory, Phil, Bubba, DJ struggled or were up and down.

[Jesse]

This tournament reminded of the movie, the Sixth Sense. The wonderful ending made you forget just how boring the build up was. The overly penal nature of the bunkers took all the fun out of the thing.

[d.b.cooper]

I gained a new respect for Lytham this past week and really enjoyed the tournament.

Studied the course on my old Atlas of Golf plus a great Strokesaver book that details the holes even further while the action was happening.

Really like #8 and #18. The old clubhouse looks terrific and the course has considerable quirk, which I like.

[KLG]

This was the first televised golf I watched to any degree this year. If I (I wish) I could chose between Olympic and Lytham to play for the rest of my life, no contest: Lytham. I'd just have to do without Sears Fine Food. Agreed on the 3-wood. With elf? Holy Jeebus. I think Adam's only real mistake coming in was the tee shot on the 18th. He'll be back. And I will be to, as long as the BBC feed functions on this little computer next year.

Excellent work, Geoff. Don't forget to tell us about your post-Open golf expedition.

One more thing, those of you making the argument that Tiger is statistically among the best drivers of the ball in professional golf? According to ESPN and the PGAT, Joe Ogilvie also won $166 more last year than Sam Snead won in his entire career.

[Easingwold]

I have played Lytham and I can tell you it is a fantastic course. It has more bunkers however, than any of the other Open courses...you MUST stay out of them. However, it is much better to marvel at the skills of the players trying to cope with them, than the endess lakes on courses in Florida. One thing about Woods and driving. He hasen't been a good driver of the ball for many years. These stats this year come from easy driving layouts he has played. He was scared to use his driver, unlike Ernie and Adam. If the wind had been blowing all 4 days, Woods wouldn't have made the top 20, so bad is his driving.

[Sari]

Easingworld:

I'll give you that Muirfield and Doral are easy driving lay-outs, but Bay Hill, Honda et al most assuredly are not. The truth lies somewhere in between. Me thinks Tiger is much improved as a driver of the golf ball (his misses are way better), but he still doesn't have the confidence to go with the big stick repeatedly, especially when the stakes (majors) are high and especially in a left to right wind. That is, he doesn't have confidence in a right to left tee-ball yet.

[Smitty]

Two words for Lytham: Balloon ball.

It is time for a bigger, lighter ball!

'Nuff said!

[carnaptious and camsteerie]

The bunkers were the real stars of the week. Case in point being, the final hole of the final round. Els played the drive of the week up to just short of the crossover point, taking out the bunkers on either side completely and bang slap in the middle of the fairway. Scott, on the other hand, made his final mental error in taking a 3-wood bringing the bunkers into play. One bounce and straight into a bunker on the left and the rest as they say ...

In so far as the rough was concerned, there wasn't a lot they could do about that other than to rip it out by the roots.

As a footnote, I thought it very strange that, even though Woods was, to all intents and purposes, out of contention by the time he reached 18, he still took an iron from the tee. Why didn't he give it a welly with the driver? For someone who has been driven all his life to surpass JN's record, why should he have cared where he finished at that point?