Oakland Hills Finisher Remains...There

Carlos Monarrez reports that the R&A setup of Oakland Hills teetered on the edge of absurdity for Monday's Open Championship qualifier. But this that stood out about Rees Jones's rees-toration of his father's bludgeoning of Donald Ross's masterpiece:

Sean O'Hair, who recovered from a triple bogey on the first hole to shoot 68, wasn't a big fan of the 238-yard uphill par-three 17th or the 498-yard uphill par-four 18th. Both holes require an approach shot with a long iron or lofted wood to a narrow green.

"The last two holes are ridiculous," O'Hair said. "I hit five-wood into 17, the par three. And 18, it's like where do you hit it? If you're a little bit right, you're screwed. If you hit it down the left side, it's going to release through the fairway and you've got nothing."

So nice to know some things haven't changed. Steve Jones will be pleased. The lamest finishing hole in major championship golf remains intact.

Seriously, how is it that this hole was not addressed? Didn't RTJ II add the fairway bunker down the left that caught Lehman in the 1996 Open?

Anyway... 

The South was lengthened about 350 yards under the recent update, and Monday it played its new full length of 7,445 yards. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, which conducted the qualifier, chose the pin placements.

"These are very, very tricky greens," said R&A director Michael Tate. "We have not put them in the most difficult places. Some greens it's very difficult to find anything less. I think also this is a qualifier event for a major championship. It's not a regular tour event. This goes directly into a major, so you might reasonably expect that things are a little tougher."

"‘What we’re trying to do, like all other championship courses, is modernize it and fit it to today’s golfers"

Chay Rao looks at TPC Avenel's pending renovation and featured this from course superintendent Chad Adcock.

‘‘It will be a much better layout,” Adcock said. ‘‘I know that Tiger said that he would like to stay at Congressional, but if they can’t host the [AT&T National] in ’09 and ’11, and they look for another venue, we would like to be that venue.

‘‘I know that the membership here was proud of their Tour stop, and was disappointed to lose it,” he said. ‘‘They want it back.”

One of the major changes to the course will be to its ability to handle extreme weather.

‘‘We are going to restore Rock Run Stream [which runs through the course] to the size and status that it had a few hundred years ago,” Adcock said. ‘‘We are also going to add about 12 to 14 acres of wetlands, so that the course can handle the once-in-a-generation storm, like the one we had last year.”

The PGA Tour has set aside $20 million to make extensive changes to a course that has received poor reviews from several PGA Tour players since it opened in 1987. The Booz Allen Classic — once known as the Kemper Open and FBR Capital Classic for a year — was held at Avenel annually from 1987 to 2006 with the exception of 2005.

Due to the lack of enthusiasm, Avenel’s signature event, the Booz Allen Classic, failed each year to draw many of the top players in golf. That lack of star power was one of the contributing factors to the tournament’s demise.

‘‘The game changed considerably over the last 20 years,” Dennis Ingram, the former superintendent at Avenel told The Gazette last year. ‘‘The landing areas, as they were designed to be, are basically obsolete. ... It becomes an unfair advantage for longer players versus the normal players.

‘‘What we’re trying to do, like all other championship courses, is modernize it and fit it to today’s golfers,” he said.

$20 million in part because these guys had to go and be better athletes! Glad that steroid testing will be starting soon.

Castle Stuart On You Tube

Developer Mark Parsinen introduces his Scotland co-design with Gil Hanse in the first of what he says will be several "making of" videos to be posted online.

Klein on Chambers Bay, Municipal Golf

Golfweek's Bradley Klein looks at the evolution of municipal golf in the context of $20 million Chambers Bay and also reviews the new RTJ Jr./Bruce Charlton/Jay Blasi design in Tacoma, writing:

Chambers Bay is the most carefully crafted and well-designed municipal golf course to open since Bethpage State Park’s Black Course in 1936. The big difference is that Chambers Bay, perched on the windy shoreline of Washington’s lower Puget Sound, has a better natural setting and makes for a more exciting walk.

"Standing around in a towel is a great way to enjoy the view."

John Paul Newport visits The Bridge and chats with founder Robert Rubin about his club and what he sees as the future of clubhouse design.

Easily the most dramatic expression of the club's idiosyncratic nature is the clubhouse, which opened just this month and occupies the highest point of land on the eastern end of Long Island. It has four angular glass-and-steel "blades" that swirl outward from a central hub and feels more like a postmodern museum perched in the hills above Los Angeles than it does anything traditionally associated with golf.

According to the architect, Roger Ferris, the blade-like design picks up on both the "dynamic tempo" of a golf swing and on the impeller assembly of a turbo-charged racing engine.

Gosh I love the Hamptons.

In any case, the 280-degree views of the Rees Jones-designed golf course, which has been open for several years, and Peconic Bay beyond are spectacular.

"The world has enough shingle-style, McMansion clubhouses," says Mr. Rubin, who effectively controls all but 25% of the shares in the club. (The rest are held by his acquiescent business partner, Gary Davis.) "What we're creating here, we think, is a model for the 21st-century golf club."

The basis for that model is Mr. Rubin's interpretation of how people actually use golf clubs these days.

"The clubhouse at Shinnecock Hills perfectly reflected its time and place," Mr. Rubin observes, referring to the famed 116-year-old golf club only seven miles away and its classic Stanford White structure. Messrs. Rubin and Ferris consciously imitated the way the Shinnecock clubhouse dominates its landscape and is grandly visible from many locations on the course. But functionally, Mr. Rubin contends, the old clubhouses are no longer relevant, even though a lot of new clubhouses still reflexively ape them.

And...

Another thing that Mr. Rubin noticed is that modern golf-club members like to sit around in their locker rooms after a round and schmooze, so he decreed that the locker rooms should have the nicest views. As a result, the entire front walls of both the men's and women's versions are floor-to-ceiling glass, 24 feet tall in places, and they open out directly onto the club's wraparound stone terrace. Standing around in a towel is a great way to enjoy the view.

And just think of the clubhouse view for golfers.

But none of this has kept him from finding members, even at $750,000 a pop (the earliest memberships went for a mere $500,000). Mostly they are self-made men (and a handful of women) in finance, hedge funds and real estate, with a couple of doctors and lawyers thrown in (he calls them his "scholarship guys," although they get no discount) and a few in entertainment (including hip-hop mogul Lyor Cohen and artist Richard Prince).

"It can sound like a ridiculous amount of money, but a lot of members justify the cost by thinking of the club as the extra room they don't have to add onto their house," Mr. Rubin says.

You know it's funny, but I just budgeted an add-on to my second home in Malibu. Low and behold, $750,000 for that extra room. Which is why I could see where Newport was going with this:

In an area where houses routinely cost $5 million, and the really good ones near the ocean go for $10 million or more, this argument holds some logic, especially since membership will cap, at least for the time being, at 150. Currently the count is 129. He describes the club, with its cool, minimalist architecture, and its astounding views, as a place to appreciate the more meditative aspects of golf, which too much traffic would spoil.

Traffic? In the Hamptons? No! 

"The winner of the last hole picks where to hit from"

Thanks to reader John for this Stu Pospisil story on Ballyneal.

Love this little local touch...

 A caddy at Ballyneal is a golfer's best friend. One reason is the caddy discreetly carries a GPS device in the pocket of his bib, giving precise yardages to the flagstick every time. The caddy will take you on the short walks from the green to the next tee. Better follow closely, or beware of the yucca and the occasional cactus or lizard.

 Each hole on the 6,995-yard, par-71 course, routed through an area of chop hills by course architect Tom Doak, has at least three teeing grounds. Downwind holes, head to the Tiger tips. Wind gusting in the face, consider moving up one or two tees.

"How we play is that the winner of the last hole picks where to hit from," Ballyneal owner and developer Rupert O'Neal said.

The tees at Ballyneal are truly works of art. Great to hear they take full advantage of their versatility.

French Lick Restoration

Mark Montieth in the Indianapolis Star looks at Lee Schmidt's restoration of French Lick Spring Resort's Donald Ross course while noting it's fascinating history.

“We’ve got to get back to basics, back to A.W. Tillinghast, to Donald Ross-type courses"

Lee Trevino tells the Boston Herald's Joe Gordon:

“I’m real concerned about golf because we’re losing golfers every day,” Trevino said. “Golf has declined since 2000. The PGA, the USGA - no one is doing a damned thing about it. And I’ll tell you what the (problem) is: It’s too expensive to play and the reason is that these courses they’re building are too difficult and the maintenance is too high. People can’t play them, they lose too many balls. It takes too long to play.”

And...

“We’ve got to get back to basics, back to A.W. Tillinghast, to Donald Ross-type courses,” he said. “They’re 7,000 yards long and tight, but without a lot of water or hazards, so people can get around. I want to get into it full time because I’m 67 and I don’t play much any more. I’ve got nothing but time.”

Bandon, Subsidies and The Reservoir

David Cay Johnson pens a pair of New York Times Business section stories, one looking at government subsidies for real estate projects, private jet use and Bandon's airport expansion.

A second story considers the plight of Scott Cook, who will be impacted by a reservoir project that will provide more water for the town and future Bandon courses.

A Few More Tuesday Clippings

The John and Sherrie Daly matter is getting downright ugly.

In lighter news, Steve Elling looks at Oakmont's 8th and wonders if the USGA's 288-yard setup is within reason.

At 7,230 yards, the course isn't punitively long by modern standards, but the crazy eighth should generate a cacophony of complaints. From the back tee, the 288-yard par 3 is the longest in U.S. Open history -- funny how that general theme is repeated each June in some respect -- and stands an attention-getting round-wrecker.

Moreover, if the USGA set-up sadists put the flagstick on the back of the green, the hole can measure an intimidating 300 yards. Mind you, technology gains or not, the average driving distance on the PGA Tour is 285.1 yards.

In other words, this hole, as they used to say in the mills hereabouts, will separate the steel from the slag. Pittsburgh has morphed into Titanium Town.

And this from Phil Mickelson...

 "I love the hole because, in architecture -- and I've been slowly getting into architecture -- the longest par 3 you ever see is about 240 or 250 yards, and the shortest par 4 is about 330," Phil Mickelson said. "There's 80 or 90 yards there, where you don't know what to call them." 

Scott Michaux weighs in on the tree removal with this.

Ford says that the greatest irony of it all is the fact that the same course architect who oversaw the conclusion of Oakmont's deforestation project is the same one resembling Johnny Appleseed with mature trees cropping up all over Augusta National Golf Club.

"It's very coincidental that Tom Fazio is our architect who help cut them all down and he's the architect at Augusta National and they're planting trees," Ford said. "It's pretty wild, isn't it?"

It's quite a lark considering that Augusta National played the defining role in Oakmont's shaded canopy era to begin with.

"If it weren't for Augusta, we never would have planted the trees in the first place," said Ford.

Mike Dudurich explores some of the wild and weird occurrences on the wonderful short 17th. He also has this interesting playing strategy from Phil Mickelson, who you may recall, bungled Riviera's 10th earlier this year with a similarly peculiar approach.

It looks like the majority will play aggressively on the 17th. At least that's what the No. 2 player in the world, Phil Mickelson, is thinking.

"You drive it up the left of the 17th fairway and then we'll see how thick that rough is," Mickelson said. "I had a tough time hitting the green with a wedge out of there. But it's still the play, hitting it over there because it takes bogey out of play. If you don't hit a driver, you're risking a five. I'll be trying to hit it in the left rough if the pin's in the back right or in the "Big Mouth" bunker if it's front left." 

Rory Sabbatini's philosophy is even more confusing:

"Take out the driver and go for the green," the South African said without hesitation. "The rough front left of the green is the thickest on the golf course. I think you only make things more difficult on yourself if you lay up in the fairway."

Ok! Whatever floats your boat.

"This is a very dangerous trend."

Ed Sherman looks at Oakmont's tree removal and the efforts of courses in the Chicago era to undo years of green committee meddling.

Meanwhile Matthew Futterman in the New Jersey Star-Ledger also takes on the issue with a New Jersey focus and gets some epic quotes out of Rees Jones.

From Winged Foot to Wykagyl, Oak Hill to Oakmont, the trees are coming down, and the results are courses with open parkland-style views, where it is far easier to grow thick, healthy rough, and the tracks more closely resemble the original designs that made them classic more than a century ago.

At Winged Foot in Westchester, site of last year's U.S. Open, nearly 2,000 trees are gone. Oak Hill near Rochester, N.Y., site of the 1995 Ryder Cup, took out more than 1,000, including one planted in honor of former Ryder Cup player Miller Barber. The Jack Nicklaus tree survived.

Wykagyl, the New Rochelle, N.Y., club hosting this year's HSBC Women's World Match Play, took out 1,200. Pauley doesn't have an exact number for Plainfield, but he has taken out 250 during his two-year tenure there, and hundreds more came out before he arrived.

The tree-cutting debate enters the spotlight this week as the U.S. Open returns for the eighth time to Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh -- a course where thousands of trees have been removed in the past two decades.

Advocates say the classic courses are once again becoming the places they are meant to be.

"There are no trees on the golf courses in Ireland and Scotland," said noted golf course architect Stephen Kay, who designed courses at Blue Heron Pines near Atlantic City and Architects Golf Club in Lopatcong and is an advocate of the tree-clearing movement. "They could plant them. Why don't they?"

Not everyone is a fan of the tree-chopping movement, though. Montclair's Rees Jones, the so-called "Open Doctor" for his work renovating Bethpage Black and other top courses, called it a "huge mistake" except in the case of a few select courses.

Would those be at the courses undoing your dad's work?

"Trees are a part of golf, as we saw last year on the final hole of the Open, where Phil Mickelson lost because he hit his last drive into the trees," Jones said. "This is a very dangerous trend."

Dangerous? No, dangerous is a member of the Jones family meddling with a classic course!

David Fay, executive director of the United States Golf Association, said he favors cutting back certain trees on certain courses, but not everywhere.

"It depends on the course," Fay said. "In the cases of both Plainfield and Oakmont, I am a big fan of what the two clubs have done. Ditto Winged Foot."

And this is beautiful...

Jones said Donald Ross, who designed Plainfield in 1921, intended for his courses to have trees. He worries that all the tree-cutting will render the wide-open courses too easy for the world's top golfers, who can now bomb drives 350 yards without worrying about hitting the so-called bunkers in the sky.

"At Augusta they are planting trees, just for this reason," Jones pointed out. 

Oakmont's Design Evolution

Ron Whitten presents a detailed and fascinating account of Oakmont's design evolution and he attempts to figure who was most responsible for course's character. It may surprise you.

Much less inspiring or interesting is Tom Marzolf's description of the work he and Tom Fazio have done there in recent years.

More Than You Ever Wanted To Know About Trump, Vol. 1

SI's Michael Bamberger had the uneviable task of playing each of Donald Trump'sDavid Fay bloated golf courses and filed a lengthy essay on his good times. Well, at least the online version seems a lot longer than the print version, or maybe I just missed a page? Anyway, a few nuggets, including this on the USGA and Executive Director David Fay.

In the men's locker room, on darkly stained doors with gold hinges, there were lockers bearing the names of several USGA executives. Working at the USGA is about like working in a university, in terms of salary and benefits, and the initiation fee at Bedminster is $350,000, with annual dues of around $18,000. The club's not meant for those living in the genteel poverty of golf administration.

"Do you have corporate memberships here?" I asked Trump.

"No," he quickly answered.

"What about for the USGA guys?" I asked.

"For them I do." It meant this: The top USGA executives were welcome at the club as honorary members. Certain USGA executives have enjoyed such privileges at various nearby oldline clubs, clubs owned by their memberships. But Trump's a new kind of personality for the USGA, and his course is a new kind of course.

Which is exactly why they should decline!

Hmm...fast forward to this long overdue clarification.

On Jan. 21 USA Today published a front-page story that outlined Trump's golfing ambitions, most particularly his desire to have a U.S. Open at Bedminster, his New Jerseycourse. But there was one paragraph in the story that caused problems. In the story Trump describes David Fay, the executive director of the USGA, as a member of the club who plays the course frequently and has a locker near Trump's.

Fay read the story, seething. He told me later that he was only an honorary member and that he had played the course as an honorary member exactly once, and that if he had a locker there, he knew nothing about it.

Whoa there. So he did accept an honorary membership from a guy who you know badly wants a U.S. Open? And you thought the Donald wouldn't take advantage in his own special way? Okay! 

Let The Oakmont Previews Begin...

I rolled my eyes through E.M. Swift's excellent Golf Digest piece on the Oakmont members and their obsession with humiliating guests via greens stimping at 15 and other nonsense.  There really is more to the game than inflicting misery, isn't there?

Meanwhile Gerry Dulac looks at the club's tree removal for Golf World, building on his original Post-Gazette piece, and offering some fresh insights into the politics:

The decision to get rid of all the trees created one of the most contentious periods in club history, pitting members who liked shaded, tree-lined fairways against those who sought to restore Oakmont to its original design (and, by doing so, improve turf conditions). It didn't help that some of the trees were secretly removed without the consent of the membership. But with the U.S. Open returning for the first time in 13 years, most of the members have apparently embraced the new look, even if some are reluctant to say so publicly. Trees have been replaced with high fescue grass that sways in the wind, creating the Scottish look Fownes desired.

"If [the support is] not 100 percent, I don't know who is on the other side," says Ford, Oakmont's pro since 1979. "There is no grumbling at all. Everybody is very upbeat about it."

To be sure, the new-look Oakmont has received rave reviews from just about everyone in golf. What's more, the restoration, which began shortly after the club hosted the 1992 U.S. Women's Open, has helped restore some luster to the Oakmont tradition. Because of the changes, Oakmont has moved up to No. 5 on Golf Digest's America's 100 Greatest Courses, behind only Pine Valley, Shinnecock Hills, Augusta National and Cypress Point. Even the USGA is pleased with the new look, advising other clubs seeking to undergo similar restoration to form a committee and visit Oakmont.

Fast forward... 

Oakmont's decision to remove trees was not widely embraced, even outside the membership. Environmentalists wrote letters and e-mails, protesting the wide-ranging elimination and citing the ecological problems created by their loss. A local church even offered prayers, asking for the trees' survival. Internally, some club members threatened lawsuits, claiming trees were removed without their knowledge.

"There are now 85 bunkers on the Ailsa and this plodder seemed to splash out of most of them."

The Scotsman's Mike Aitken hunkers down in full resort-newsletter mode and swoons breathlessly over the R&A's distance deregulation driven changes to Turnberry, artfully running through the cringe-worthy checklist of what a major championship "test" is to provide.

In terms of heightening the difficulty of the Ailsa - both Tom Watson and Nick Price won at Turnberry with 72 hole totals of 268, the lowest winning scores for an Open in Scotland - the most significant changes have taken place at the 16th, 17th and 18th holes. The 16th, once pretty but toothless, has been transformed. By moving the fairway left, the re-modelled par 4 has become a 458-yard dogleg which approaches the same green from a far trickier angle.

Key word, trickier. That usually means rigged to combat the distance jumps that we failed to understand and regulate.

This alteration enabled Martin Ebert from MacKenzie Ebert course designers, with input from the Royal and Ancient,

 His name's Peter Dawson...sorry, continue... 

to create a new back tee for the 17th which stretches a previously soft par 5 to 558 yards. Throw in a new 18th tee built to the left of the 17th fairway and it's little wonder George Brown, Turnberry's golf course manager, believes the alterations to the last three holes have added a stroke-and-a-half of difficulty to the finish.

And now you know why they haven't turned out a decent architect since MacKenzie, and he wasn't really even Scottish. 

Where previously the aspiring champion standing on the 16th tee thought about making a couple of birdies, matching par is now no disgrace.

Well, and you know Turnberry has produced such dogs for winners. Watson, Norman, Price and that horrible duel in '77! It had to go!

According to Michael Tait, director of the R&A, the changes to the Ailsa are sure to enhance the reputation of a links which hasn't staged an Open since Nick Price clutched the Claret Jug in 1994. "It's important at any Open venue to have closing holes which will test the best players in the world and we believe the changes at 16, 17 and 18 will give Turnberry a very strong finish," said Tait. "The burn in front of the 16th green didn't really come into play for the top players before. By re-routing the hole, and changing the angle, we feel the second shot there is much more challenging.

Yawn... 

"The Ailsa has always been renowned as the most scenically beautiful links on the championship rota and we were fortunate to be able to build new tees on the seventh and the tenth holes which add to the visual appeal as well as toughening the golf course. The new tee on the seventh has been built on reclaimed land from the sea, while the new tenth tee, with a shot over a rocky promontory, is quite spectacular."

As well as adding 227 yards of length - the par-70 Ailsa measures 7,224 yards compared to 6,967 in 1994 - 21 new bunkers have also been built. Having played the course last week with Stewart Selbie, Turnberry's manager, it is clear how shrewdly these hazards have been deployed. There are now 85 bunkers on the Ailsa and this plodder seemed to splash out of most of them.

Okay everyone on three, one, two, three, "oy vey!"