"What they see on television is what they want."

Vartan Kupelian looks at the extreme setups of recent major championship courses, and becomes yet another writer to openly draw the conclusion that par is being protected for no good reason. Actually, Kupelian is one of the rare ones who takes it a step further and sees a negative impact on the everyday game:

Why? Why not leave the great courses alone? Why turn them into bumper-car rides with crashes at every turn?

It's done to protect par in the face of the onslaught of the world's best golfers, armed with equipment technology and an evolution of their own abilities.

But in defending par, a dangerous precedent is being set. Daunting course setups with undulating greens rolling at breakneck speeds, ankle-deep rough and narrowing fairways are beginning to change the game at the recreational level.

It's a contradiction for organizations like the United States Golf Association, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, and course operators world-wide who are fighting the battle of flat participation numbers. That makes retention a key factor and it's hard to keep golfers when the game is less fun, more expensive and takes more time.

What the severe setup of courses on the major championship rotation -- Shinnecock, Winged Foot, Oakmont, Carnoustie and even Augusta National, where the opening rounds this year resembled a U.S. Open, not the Masters -- have resulted in is a skewed view of what a golf course needs to be.

Too many recreational golfers don't bother to discern between the lethal major championship set-ups and what they play. What they see on television is what they want. It's no different than seeing the pristine emerald at Augusta National on television and transferring those images to the home courses. It's impractical, of course, but it happens every year.

It's a common refrain among course operators that their golfers too often don't play the proper tee, that they choose markers too intense for their ability. By today's standards, golf courses that don't stretch to 7,400 yards are viewed as deficient. It's an unwarranted view but increasingly prevalent in course design.

"Part of the strategy on any links is avoiding the bunkers. But we couldn't see too many of them because of the rough!"

John Huggan reminds us that Carnoustie is a great golf course, we just couldn't see it under all that rough in 1999. He reviews the event in his Sunday column.

First, this memory from Geoff Ogilvy:

"Then I got up there. It was such a disappointment. Breaking 80 was an unbelievable effort. If there is one course on the rota that doesn't need to be touched at all, it is Carnoustie. And they got lucky. It didn't even blow to any great extent. It was the greenness of the rough that was embarrassing. It looked so cultivated and unnatural. It was bizarre."

That it was, the strangeness of the whole situation summed up by the sight of Greg Norman, one of the game's most powerful players, missing the 17th fairway by a foot with his tee-shot, then swinging as hard as he could in a vain effort to move the ball from a lie best described as subterranean. The whole thing was getting silly enough to cause the then 20-year-old Sergio Garcia to burst into tears after an opening round of 89. Less than one month later, it should be noted, the young Spaniard was good enough to finish second in the USPGA Championship.

"If you missed the fairway - any fairway - by even a yard, you were hacking out," remembers Australian Peter O'Malley, one of golf's straightest hitters and the man who hit the opening tee-shot on day one. "We were just lucky the weather wasn't too bad. If it had been really windy no one would have broken 300.

"The set up was really weird. Part of the strategy on any links is avoiding the bunkers. But we couldn't see too many of them because of the rough!"

And on John Philp's contribution to the game...

Most, if not all, of the blame for the craziness was heaped on the head of one John Philp, the head greenkeeper. And it must be said he deserved nearly all of the criticism that rained down on his misguided head. Indeed, the much-maligned Philp did not help himself with a series of public comments seemingly designed to further alienate the world's best golfers.

"Golf is about character and how a player stands up to adversity," he sneered. "But, like a lot of things in life, golf has gone soft.

"Playing this type of course requires imagination and it requires handling frustration.

"I know there is a bit of a lottery in the way this course plays. Top players take badly to bad bounces. But the element of luck is critical.

"Take that away and you don't have a real game of golf. They are too pampered now."

Amidst the fast-accelerating level of complaints, the Royal & Ancient Golf Club claimed that all was well, that the jungle-like rough had been neither fertilised nor excessively watered and that, besides, they had been unable to do anything about it all. The problem, they claimed, was caused solely by the weather immediately preceding the championship.

Except it wasn't of course. Almost three months before the championship, your correspondent had played the Carnoustie course in the annual media gathering hosted by the R&A. After my round I was - funnily enough - standing at the bar in the hotel behind the 18th green waiting to be served. As I did so, the then secretary of the R&A, Sir Michael Bonallack, approached and asked my opinion of the course.

This was fun too...

"There is nothing wrong with having long, wispy rough that introduces doubt in a player," confirms Scotland's Andrew Coltart, who finished in a tie for 18th back in '99. "But long, lush grass only requires us to mindlessly reach for the lob wedge and is just plain daft.

"Eight years ago, the rough was just so thick and looked to me like it had been fertilised. There was no chance to get the ball on the green and no chance even to take a chance, if you see what I mean. I played with Tiger Woods on the last day and even he couldn't hit out of that stuff. So it was boring to play and, I'm sure, to watch. It was drive, chop out, wedge to green."

And Barker Davis, writing for the Sunday Telegraph, offers these remembrances...

Lee Westwood

The first round I was playing with Greg Norman, and he was playing really well, a couple under or something. On 17 he hit it right, not far right, just a couple of feet off the edge of the fairway and you virtually couldn't see it. He ended up making seven or eight and that summed it up. But I like the course, it's up in my top three with Birkdale and Muirfield.

Richard Green

I remember playing the last couple of holes on Friday just praying to get off the golf course. I was just in a lot of mental pain. There was one tee shot on the fourth that I hooked to the right. I ended up slashing about in the rough for ages. But it's still one of my favourite courses, up there with Kingston Heath in Australia and Royal Lytham.

Hank Gola, New York Daily News

It was like watching a slow-motion car wreck. When Jean Van de Velde went into the Barry Burn and rolled up his pants, it was the most amazing thing I've ever seen. The Frenchman goes up in flames. I remember walking in the play-off with Davis Love III, who was smoking a cigar at the time, and he said they got what they deserved for the set-up.

Thomas Levet

On the sixth hole I hit a drive and it bounced 90 degrees right and finished in the rough by two inches. From there I couldn't get the fairway back. So I made a drive, my sand iron five times and a putt - seven, double bogey. It was so deep I didn't know if that ball was going to go one yard or 80. But what I remember most is Jean Van de Velde. I was at the airport with Dean Robertson.

We were sitting in the lounge at Edinburgh watching Jean play the last hole.

It was a great moment of golf, like a great tragedy, but it was not very good to know it was a Frenchman. We couldn't believe it. We were speechless. It was crazy that day.

Michael Campbell

I think I shot 13 over and missed the cut by one. I remember sitting down with a bunch of players and watching the coverage on the Friday afternoon. It was carnage. It was pathetic really. I watched Norman hit it two yards in the rough. I wasn't laughing at the time. I was shaking my head saying: "This is not right, this is not good TV."

"How can you not look at scores?"

Doug Ferguson looks at this year's "rigorous" majors and wonders what exactly that means. This part was particularly fun:

Jim Hyler, head of the championship committee at the USGA, preached all week at Oakmont that the mission was to create a "rigorous test" at the U.S. Open, but he offered a peculiar defense when 35 players failed to break 80 in the second round, and someone suggested the USGA again had gone over the top.

"The players' scores mean nothing to us," he said. "Absolutely nothing."

But if that's the case, how does he know the test has been rigorous?

"We're not performing in front of judges," Justin Leonard said. "They don't rate every shot. How can you not look at scores?"

Oh Justin, really, they aren't fixated on par. They only break out the '96 Chateau Lafite Rothschild if the winning score is +8 or higher. Special occasions only.

The Royal & Ancient paid more attention to the players' reactions than their scores, and chief executive Peter Dawson conceded that Carnoustie was too extreme in 1999. Asked if the R&A regretted how the course was set up, he replied, "I think so."

"To be honest, we regard player reaction as very important," Dawson said. "The reaction there was clearly more negative than we would liked to have seen."

What to expect this time?

"We are not seeking carnage," Dawson said. "We're seeking an arena where the players can display their skills to the best effect."

As usually, the R&A's head man had to offset his sound thinking with the ridiculous:

"The key part of the game of golf is to have an element of unfairness and to be able to handle it when it happens to you," Dawson said. "If everything was totally fair, it would be dull."

You see Peter, that's Mother Nature's job, perhaps with the occasional assist from a funny bounce. The bad breaks from silly fairway contours, knee high rough and bad hole locations? That's a different deal. It's called contrived. And usually the people doing the contriving are the same ones who obsess about how winning scores might reflet on themselves.  

Skill and Southern Hills

From Doug Ferguson's AP notes column:

“I don’t mind Mother Nature slapping us around as long as they understand skill is the thing that wins tournaments, not luck.” -Stuart Appleby, on the setups at major championships

Having just toured Southern Hills on a delightful day in Tulsa (really!), I can say that it would be nice if Mother Nature cooperated by not dropping so much water on the course. Due to a number of circumstances (which I'll be writing about for a publication in advance of the PGA), Southern Hills really has a chance to shine this year...if it would stop raining! 

“It’s not rocket science not to put the flag where it was."

This one includes a wrinkle I've never heard of before, and I'm a connoisseur of course setup debacle stories!

Golfweek's Alistair Tait reports.

International Final Qualifying for the Open Championship at Sunningdale, England, turned into a farce when players couldn’t get near the pin at the par-3 fourth hole.
 
It brought back visions of the seventh at Shinnecock Hills during the 2004 U.S. Open, when no player could hold the green even with a perfectly struck shot.

But remember, Furman Bisher says that was just because that darn rain that was not in the forecast never came! 

Martin Kippax, the R&A’s championship chairman, set up the pins at Sunningdale.

Why did that sentence not come as a shock. 

Most of them were fine, with the exception of the fouth on Sunningdale’s Old Course.
 
Eight players completed the hole before Kippax realized he’d messed up. Argentina’s Ricardo Gonzalez five-putted, and Australian Brett Rumford four-putted. Four-putting isn’t unusual, but Rumford had hit his tee shot to 2 feet.
 
Play was suspended so the hole could be repositioned. The eight players who had already played the hole were carted back out after they had finished 18 holes so they could replay the hole.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they got a replay! I wonder what would have happened if they made a higher score than before? Do they get to pick the lowest!?

The result was a mixed bag. Gonzalez made par the second time and his score changed from 70 to 67. England’s Richard Bland made birdie the first time around but parred the hole the second time to move his score from 72 to 73. Sweden’s Fredrik Anderson Hed was affected the most. He parred the hole on his first attempt but double bogeyed the hole on his second to change a 66 to a 68.
 
“I chose the pin positions because of the weather we’ve had and the forecast we had for today,” Kippax said. “I was then made aware by a referee on the course that we had a potential problem. I went out and saw that it was in an unplayable position.
 
“So, after consulting with various people – certainly the European Tour – I suspended play and moved the pin position.
 
“I admit it was a mistake and the responsibility lies on me and me only. I apologized to the eight, and Richard Bland said it was not in his interests and asked, ‘Why was it there in the first place?’
 
“They were perfectly justifiable things to say, but I told them it was only going to be equitable if everybody had to play it again whether it’s good or bad for them.”
 
Plaudits go to Kippax for putting his hand up and admitting his error, but I tend to agree with Anderson Hed.

Oh yes, big plaudits!

“I think the European Tour should do the pins,” he said. “Every time I’ve played in an event run by the R&A there have been one or two that were barely playable.”
 
Bland was just as caustic in his condemnation of the R&A. “It’s not rocket science not to put the flag where it was. Anything with a small bit of speed that didn’t go in was going to roll off the green.”

"Will they be talking about the 2007 US Open in 2042?"

Uh, that's a no!

The New Zealand Herald's Peter Williams is bored with excessive major setups and issues a warning that will inevitably go ignored because it's way too nuanced.

Golf, like all sports, is in the entertainment business. Its money comes through being an exciting spectacle on television.

The best TV sport is always when the best players perform at their optimum in conditions fair to everyone. I don't think those conditions prevailed at Augusta in April and certainly not at Oakmont last week. In two major championships this year, nobody has finished under par. That's entertainment? Give me a break. It's survival and not much fun to watch or play.

The story goes that after Johnny Miller shot 63 to win the 1973 US Open at Oakmont, the USGA and Oakmont membership vowed that never again would they be embarrassed by somebody ripping a championship course apart.

Embarrassed? That was brilliant play; engaging, exciting and still talked about 35 years later. Will they be talking about the 2007 US Open in 2042? About the greatest player of all time not able to make a birdie in his last 32 holes because of greens so fast you couldn't hit a putt firmly enough to hold the line?

"It is making us look like fools."

I didn't catch these comments from Michael Campbell during the U.S. Open coverage:

"It is on the edge of embarrassing some of the guys," Campbell said.

"It wasn't much fun out there, put it that way. I used to enjoy coming to major tournaments and playing them.

"But when you are out there grinding your butt off for bogeys and pars it is not very nice.

"We felt that at Augusta this year. Normally you get a guy charging on the back nine and shooting 30 like Jack Nicklaus did in 1986. To me that is exciting TV and for the players and the spectators, too.

"But now there are just guys making bogeys and it is making us look like fools."

But don't you see Michael, that's the very point. You and your cohorts had to go and make all that money, get the babes and worst of all drive the ball 350 yards, making these governing body dudes look bad. You must pay! 

A Firm Progression?

The most interesting player comment out of Oakmont came from 2006 final group contender Kenneth Ferrie, talking to Gary Van Sickle:

"This is the first time I've played a golf course where it didn't rain and the course has gotten softer every round.

"It's mind boggling, really. Thursday and Friday you're trying to bounce the ball up onto the greens. Today, I actually had a few shots hit the green and spin back."

The USGA's Mike Davis gets points for applying water to prevent an all out debacle. And as you may recall, the Masters this year saw borderline firm and fast all week, then applied water to the greens after the committee had gotten in their licks.

But that's the Masters and at least they recognized the need for the traditional Sunday fireworks.

The U.S. Open is a different beast. It should be the most difficult major of the year, but shouldn't that difficulty ideally progress from day one to the finish, with Sunday's "examination" being the culmination of a week's worth of golf?

Personally, I have long respected the USGA history of giggling at the PGA Tour's willingness to play lift, clean and place. You may remember that Tom Meeks noted they would not be playing "lift, clean and cheat" after Wednesday's deluge at the 1996 U.S. Open. ("Commissioner, I have Mr. Meeks on line 1 to apologize...)

The blue coats are big rub 'o the green guys and gals, touting their devotion to playing the ball down no matter what. And firm greens and landing areas have always been priority 1.  Play it as it lies.

Yet they now set up courses with such confining width, extreme speeds and different rough heights for different holes that they are having to use water to dictate the way the ball reacts when it hits the ground.

So I'm interested in what everyone thinks of this notion of a tournament course getting softer each day without rain. Were the measures taken at Oakmont a positive direction for the game or will it open the door for all sorts of strange antics (particularly with the advent of Sub-Air systems where a committee could present radical extremes from day to day)?

"If the USGA isn't fixated on par, why does it usually take one or two holes that members play as par-5s, and turn them into par-4s for the U.S. Open?"

Brad Myers in The Journal News wrote this column that appeared on Thursday, but I just stumbled on it and it proves timely in light of this week's U.S. Open. And proves even more timely in light of the media's dismal performance at Wednesday's USGA news conference...

David Fay, executive director of the USGA, recently spoke at a media day for the 2009 U.S. Women's Open, to be held at Saucon Valley in Bethlehem, Pa. If it seems like they're planning a little too far ahead on that one, it's because they are.

Afterward, I asked Fay a few questions about the U.S. Open. The first: Does the USGA strive to have the winner shoot close to even par?

"We're not fixated on par," Fay demanded. In fact, he seemed a little offended.

OK. How would the USGA react if there was a U.S. Open where the winner shot 20-under par, second place shot 18-under, and someone shooting 10-under finished 17th?

If Fay wasn't offended before, he was now. He paused, searching for words, before saying, "It would be an aberration."

The next question: If the USGA isn't fixated on par, why does it usually take one or two holes that members play as par-5s, and turn them into par-4s for the U.S. Open?

"That's nothing new," Fay said. "We've been doing that for years, since at least the 1950s."

That answered how long it has been done. It didn't answer why. But there would be no more questions, because Fay politely, and conveniently, excused himself.

The Difference Between Davis and Meeks

As much as I hate seeing the course artificially softened on day three of a major, it's great to see Mike Davis err on the side of common sense by watering the greens prior to play today. Despite David Fay's declarations that the course was right where they wanted it yesterday and today, Davis clearly realized Friday was on the edge of goofy and made the call to throttle things back.

A few years ago such measures would not have been taken to such an extent and that's how we got fiascos like Shinnecock.

Now if Davis could just widen out those landing areas so they don't need to be slowed down, we'd really be making progress.

Phil: "This golf course is a physical hazard to the players. I don't think that that has been very well thought out."

Another excellent edition of Golf Channel's Pre-Game U.S. Open coverage featured the usual gang (Kann, Pepper, Nobilo, Oosterhuis, Lerner) stepping up to the plate with fresh insights into the field and course, with colorful (literally) reports from Marty Hackel and a fun look inside the Pirates' ballpark.

But it was all highlighted by the Steve Sands interview with an obviously perturbed Phil Mickelson.

One comment from Phil was notable for its honesty and accuracy, the other just a sign of these wacky times. 

Sands: You nervous at all...about the wrist?

Mickelson: I'm uncertain whether or not it's going to hold up on some of the shots out of the rough. It's been hurt in this rough before. Yesterday, 5, 6 people got hurt that Jim Weathers had to go work on. I think this golf course is a physical hazard to the players. I don't think that that has been very well thought out. So I think every player should be concerned--not just me--when they hit a shot in the rough.

I know I've shared my bias on this as someone who had a wrist injury and as someone who finds it pitiful that rough is harvested like a crop so grown men can compensate for some mysteriously vacant portion of their golfing soul that believes this torture rewards skill, but isn't there something seriously wrong with the game when antics like rough-on-steroids could impact our national championship and potential damage the well-being of a player and his career?

Anyway, here's the part where the modern player mentality of having consistent greens throughout the course is a bit hard for me to relate to. Continuing on after his comments about the rough...

Mickelson: This has forced me to prepare on the greens. Pelz and I have been out here on the greens this weekend, I feel like I have a good concept of how the putts break but also the speeds. You know the speeds have fluctuated tremendously from green to green. And I know they're doing the best, but they do the same thing to each green. They cut it the same height, roll it the same for every green. Well that's just ridiculous because you have greens that are high that are more exposed and  get more wind and greens that are low that get a lot more moisture, so the fluctuation in the greens have been up to four and half feet from the fastest to the slowest. And so I think guys are going to struggle and I think that on the greens I may have an advantage knowing what the actual green speed is.

I guess this is where I would say to Phil that you knowing the varying speeds of each green is a cool thing and that attempts to make speeds uniform would be more contrived than what's out there now.  

"The ball just keeps rolling and rolling."

Thanks to reader Kevin for this Robert Dvorchak story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette looking at the history of the Stimpmeter.

This beautifully sums up Oakmont's greens:

On six of the 18 greens, the surfaces aren't flat enough to get a Stimpmeter reading. The ball just keeps rolling and rolling. So the numbers from the 12 flatter greens are used for the course average.

"You can hit great, straight drives in the US Open and still miss the fairway."

John Huggan follows up on his Golf Digest interview with Geoff Ogilvy with a few more questions for the defending champion. Ogilvy touched on a similar notion about driving accuracy in the Q&A we did for Links (not online). I think he's onto something with regard to the effect of the 21-24 yard landing area...

JH: Ironically, the US Open isn't the one of the four your game would seem most suited to.

GO: No. I have thought a lot about that. I would have expected, for someone like me who is a little wayward off the tee even when playing well, that Augusta or the Open would be the best bet. But US Opens are so narrow that straight hitters almost lose their advantage. Everyone is in the rough. And I'm used to that and they are not.

You can hit great, straight drives in the US Open and still miss the fairway. So it almost works against those guys. I mean, I'm quite happy hitting seven shots out of the rough. I do that every day. They don't.

I'm not alone, though. Take a look at the leader board at Winged Foot.

Phil was up there and he isn't the straightest hitter. Everyone talks about how you have to hit it straight at the US Open. And I thought that too. But in hindsight I'm not so sure. No-one can hit it straight enough to hit every fairway in the US Open. It's so difficult, almost impossible really. You can be a great driver of the ball and still miss six fairways in a day. And you can drive badly and do that.

JH: What do you think of all the rough around the greens?

GO: I think some of the holes at Winged Foot would have been better served if balls were allowed to run away from the greens, rather than get stopped within a few feet.

JH: Which is what happened with your approach to the last green came up short.

GO: Exactly. That created quite an interesting shot.

Winged Foot is a stellar course though. I can't say anything bad about it because I won! I loved the fact that they had trimmed the trees so that you can see a lot of the course under the branches. That has been lost in a lot of places, but Winged Foot had that look about it.

It also has some of the coolest greens I have ever seen.

Furrow Specs

Craig Dolch in the Palm Beach Post offers this on Jack Nicklaus's bunker furrowing plans for this week's Memorial:

This year, though, the tines on the rakes won't be spread as far apart as last year — they'll be 13/4 inches this year as opposed to 21/2 inches in 2006 — but the effect will be the same.

"All I want them to say is, 'That's a place I don't want to be,' " Nicklaus said Friday at his North Palm Beach offices. "I don't care about penalizing the guy. I'm trying to force him to play the strategy of the golf course by not wanting to be in a bunker. Guys aim for bunkers because it's an easy shot."

"It's more lush than I think we'd kind of hoped"

Tim Rosaforte's online column looks at Oakmont and the potential conditions for this year's Open.

"I was just there Sunday-Monday, and it's more lush than I think we'd kind of hoped," said Mike Davis, the course set-up man for the USGA. Davis sent correspondence to Zimmers, telling him to send out the mowers once it stops raining. Last year at Winged Foot, the first step in the graduated rough was 3 ½ to 4 inches. He asked Zimmers to trim that first cut to 2 ¾ inches. The goal is to make it short enough so the players can show their skills. The week of the tournament, "It could be higher, it could be lower," said Davis.

This doesn't sit too well at Oakmont, a club that prides itself on sending its guests home feeling the privilege of being penalized by its brutality. "I've never seen an Open here at Oakmont where it wasn't six-inch rough right off the fairway," said the host pro, Bob Ford. "So if it's playable just off the fairway, I think it will have a great effect on the score. Again, it's all about wet and dry: If it's wet it's going to be one score, if it's dry, it's going to be another score. That's true on all golf courses, but particularly here."

Yes, that 6 inches right off the fairway is such a good test especially when...

Some of the club's members--guys who play in the Swat competitions--are predicting that if the course plays hard and fast, double digits will win The Open. The reason being, Oakmont's fairways were running about 11 on the Stimp after Zimmers put the rollers on them. The average fairway width at Oakmont will be 28 yards, but as one of the club's scratch players pointed out on Thursday, some of the tighter driving holes are only 22 yards wide in spots. But those 22 yards really play 10 yards wide because most of the landing areas tilt and pitch toward the deep stuff.

Sounds fun!

"Some of the fairway are really tight, and to be honest, one of my concerns is that they get too fast," Davis said. "They've got so much roll, that if they get too fast it's not going to be a good Open. We don't want it turning into '87 at [The] Olympic [Club]. We're going to ask John to hand water the drive zones to keep good drives from rolling into the intermediate rough."

On top of this, the participants will be putting on greens that Zimmers gets rolling at 15 for the year-end Swat Party.

That tells you who the best player is!