It’s back!
Twenty years later Tatra Press has kindly allowed me to bring back Grounds For Golf now that golf architecture is of more interest to the masses. A new Introduction looks at what’s driven the interest growth and two new chapters I had a blast adding (plus a few edits to keep things up-to-date).
The Amazon purchase page for the book arriving June 15, 2026.
Okay, I'm bored. Time to head to the beach. (It's 78 with a light breeze and no smog here in the home of the homeless).
With Winged Foot playing the players instead of the players playing the course, I'm going to take in some some sun.
I know this whole humiliating the players instead of identifying them is the USGA way, and I kow it makes bad golfers feel good about themselves. But this is deadly.
Your thoughts on the first two rounds?
Err, media center.
Seth Davis blogs on the foul mood of the assembled inkslingers, Nikon v. Canon experts and other assorted moochers lounging around the media hub.
And not because half just of the writers had to scrap maudlin, pre-prepared, GWAA award-worthy, father-son column based on a Tiger Woods run at the title.
No, it seems their wireless is iffy and that they aren't too excited about the leaderboard. Can't blame 'em.
From ASAP:
Q. How was the course playing today compared to yesterday?And...
GEOFF OGILVY: To be fair, I think at first the first few holes were probably easier than they were yesterday afternoon, then it progressively got harder. Every green you got on was a little browner than the one before and a bit faster and glassier and it starts bouncing. By the end of the day there were some pretty big bounces on the greens. I'm glad I'm finished. This afternoon it's going to be pretty hard work for them.
Q. You have a pretty good record in majors. Any part of the learning process or something that you're taking out there?
GEOFF OGILVY: I mean, a 20 something last year at Pinehurst, I was like, I could probably do all right. Before that I didn't think I could do any good in a U.S. Open because I don't drive it very straight. I would have said it's the least likely of the four for me to do well in.
After last year, I thought, you know, there must be something in there that allows me to get there in a U.S. Open. Then I played great at St. Andrews, great at Baltusrol, and Baltusrol was similar to a U.S. Open setup. I think I get in a better frame of mind in majors than I maybe get in regular tournaments.
This is fun...
Q. Would you go through your birdies and bogeys starting with 11.
Finish why you do well in the majors.
Oops, someone didn't like that attempt at a rally kill!
GEOFF OGILVY: Because you have to be. You have to finish well, otherwise you're going home early, and you only gets four chances a year at it maybe. For some reason, I seem to handle adversity better in a major. I seem to have been, anyway. If I'm 2 over after 5 in a regular Tour event, I'm probably not the most cheerful guy in the world, but I was quite fine today. I was not stressing at all because that's kind of what you do.
I don't know, I think four times a year you've got to have your best you've got to bring your brain and your patience, and if you don't, you're not going to do any good. You've got a choice, and I'm trying to have a better one.
And...
Q. Are you surprised that the defending champ, looks like he's out of the tournament?
GEOFF OGILVY: No, you can play well here and get a few bad breaks and shoot 80 before you know it. I played with David Howell and Bo Van Pelt and did nothing wrong, and a couple holes in a row, they hit a couple bad shots and they're done for. It's pretty brutal out there. You've got to try and avoid the train wrecks. If you hit a bad shot, try and get a bogey and get away. You're only one bad swing away from a big number out there.
Q. Is it a different player who excels in a tournament where par is a real good score as opposed to 7 under?
GEOFF OGILVY: I don't know, it's hard to say. It's a different mindset you've got to set yourself. If you get yourself in the right mindset, anyone can do it out here when it's tough. You've just got to adjust where your brain is. Normally if you're going over par on the courses that we play regularly, you're really not going very well. But you can be 4 over through nine holes here and not be in bad shape. You've just got to tell yourself, you've really got to be able to read what is a good score and not a good score.
At a regular Tour event it's hard to read what a good score is. Sometimes you shoot 4 over and there's eight guys that shot 8 under.
That's why I think it helps to watch the leaderboard, because you have two or three bogeys, and you're like, everyone else is doing this, so it's got to be pretty hard out here.
No questions about the setup for the one player who has shown and ability to offer articulate thoughts on the subject??
Brett Avery summed up Tiger's second round 76 best in his on-site, hole-by-hole blog:
Woods' tee shot barely stays out of the fairway on the left and his second checks up short of the green. His shoulders are slumped as he walks to the green and the gallery barley musters a saluting round of applause. It is hard to believe his second came up short of the green, especially factoring in the downwind conditions, but this has been a hard-to-believe two days. The reigning U.S. Open and Amateur champions and arguably the greatest player in the games' history are all double-digits over par. Woods' third skips past the hole and he misses for par. That puts him 12 over for 36 holes. When he holes out he is tied for 118th place. His statistics are nothing short of deplorable: Seven fairways, 18 greens, 63 putts, 3 birdies, 21 pars, nine bogeys and three double bogeys.Tiger was up front after the round:
Q. Tell us what your emotional state is right now.
TIGER WOODS: Pissed. That pretty much sums it up right there. I thought I was playing well enough to shoot an under par round today, and I didn't do that.
Q. Was it rust?
TIGER WOODS: No, not rust. Unfortunately I just didn't put it together at the right time. I just didn't execute properly, and consequently, I shot 6 over.
Q. Was there a moment today where (inaudible).
TIGER WOODS: No.
Q. You thought as you kept grinding, you still thought you were going to turn it around?
TIGER WOODS: You've always got to feel that way. I felt like if I just kept going, kept plodding along, I could have turned it around any time with one putt or one shot. And I made two good saves there on 18 and 1 and thought that that would be pretty good. Then made a good par there on 3. All in all, I thought I could have turned it around there.
Q. This is kind of a tough tournament and a tough venue to come back. Talk about that.
TIGER WOODS: It is. It's playing really hard. The golf course is very difficult. The wind is up now, just like it was yesterday afternoon. Marginal shots are just going to get killed here; it's just the nature of this golf course. Any U.S. Open, but more so on this golf course, but any U.S. Open venue that we play, any marginal shot here just gets penalized more so than any other Open.
Q. You've never missed a cut in a major. Can you talk about that?
TIGER WOODS: It's not something you want to have happen. I've gone, I guess, a while without missing one. Unfortunately I missed this one, and hopefully I can win the British.
Q. (Inaudible).
TIGER WOODS: Yeah, I knew if I made one birdie coming in and a couple pars, the ten shot rule would get me in.
Q. 20/20 hindsight, would you have (inaudible).
TIGER WOODS: No, I was not ready to play golf.
Q. What's next?
TIGER WOODS: Practice.
Q. Will you play before the British?
TIGER WOODS: Probably the Western.
Only 10 hole locations today within 4 or less paces of the edge.
It is great that they are using the recently restored hole location on 18, as we wondered about early in the week, where you can see a photo showing where the old green boundary was.
The Journal News keeps up their fine coverage, first with Andrew Gross focusing on 12th hole play.
Andrew Weiss has the Aussie perspective, focusing on Geoff Ogilvy's play in this story, and on Ogilvy and Tiger's thoughts on the greens in this sidebar.
John Hopkins of the Times writes about...who else, but Monty, while Lawrence Donegan does the same only in more entertaining fashion.
Doug Ferguson has the American perspective on round one, while John Huggan looks at Phil Mickelson's round and talks to his masseur swing coach, Rick Smith.
Golfonline has first round audio analysis from Peter Kostis and Dave Pelz. They also offer some notes on the opening round.
For course stats, you have to go to the USGA's scoring page and then click on the Course Summary link to salivate over those cost of rough stats, which are new this year and speak such volumes about the state of the game. Eye-openers:
Averages putts per GIR on No. 1: 2.10 (only hole over 2)Boy I'm glad they didn't tier it on No. 6, more birdies would have been made and the USGA would have looked silly! Perish the thought!
Round one scoring average: 75.984
Driving distance: 289.2
Cost of rough on No. 14: 0.784
Cost of rough on non-tiered rough holes: .571 (5), .348 (6), .536 (11)
Finally Seth Davis has several entertaining blog posts about the media center antics over at SI.com, though someone needs to het him a New York Post after this post:
-- There's a rumor going around the press tent that Tiger Woods is staying not at a local hotel but on his yacht, which is presumably parked somewhere either on Long Island Sound or the Hudson River. If I were a real journalist, I would try to chase down that glistening nugget before passing it along to my readers, but since I am blogging I can put it out there and ask you all to chase it down for me. Any takers?
The New York Post story is here in case Davis wants to read it.
He has issues with the greens being too slow.
TIGER WOODS: I know the greens will be a little bit quicker. The guys were saying that it's -- we're not used to it in the U.S. Open. We just need to make the adjustment. We have plenty of time to on the putting green.
Q. Mike Davis a couple days ago said that you asked him, "When are you going to make these greens faster." Would you like to see them faster?
TIGER WOODS: You're used to playing U.S. Opens with fast greens; these aren't. With the pitch on these greens, you have to keep it on the slower side; we're just not used to being in the U.S. Open with greens this slow. If anything, the greens should have been slower last year. You have to make the adjustment. We're all playing the same golf course. You just have to understand that they're just a little bit slower than we're used to.
Q. (Inaudible) low score that could be had out there tomorrow?
TIGER WOODS: The greens are soft on some holes. Some holes are spongy and stringy. You can throw the ball in there and have it stop virtually where it landed. But in the wind hole, after three, I wasn't very happy.
According to a trusted eyewitnesses, USGA course setup man Mike Davis was seen several times in his cart today at Winged Foot accompanied NOT by the sitting Championship Committee Chair Jim Hyler (as is custom), but by USGA President and Citation jet man Walter Driver.
Poor Mike couldn't even enjoy his first day at the Open in charge.
Thanks to reader Sean for the heads up on this great unbylined story in the USA Today (by Tom Spousta?) on the lost art of shotmaking. Some of the juiciest quotes, starting with Lee Trevino:
"You could punch little shots in there, punch little shots in here. Low drivers down the left side. Fly the ball to a spot and let it roll. Punch shots into greens as hard as bricks. ... You had to place every shot in the right position," Trevino says. "I was carving drivers left to right. I'd even hit some irons right to left. Jack was doing the same thing. People think all Jack did was hit it 5 miles and up in the air. He could hit it low, fade it, hook it; he could do whatever the heck he wanted with it.
"They called me more of a shot-maker than Jack," Trevino continues, "because I didn't have the high ball. I had to hit more weird shots than he did. Heck, they think Tiger Woods can hit a ball high? Shoot, Jack could hit a 1-iron so high and it would come down so soft you could catch it in your mouth."
And:
"It's non-existent. The kids out here are just hitting it as hard as they can and taking short clubs and whacking it out of the rough," says Kenny Perry, who has noticed fewer players in recent years working on shaping shots at the practice range.
"It's a dying art. There's just not many people that even want to try to hit those shots," says Corey Pavin, the 1995 U.S. Open champion who sealed his victory with a 4-wood approach shot he shaped right-to-left at the 72nd hole.
You can add Trevino to the anti-America, technophobic agenda setters:
"There's no such animal as shot-making anymore," Trevino says. "And it's not the fault of the player. It's the equipment."
Vijay has a simple take on the matter, and our friends in Fairhaven will probably sending the USA Today a love note for the second graph:
"The ball flies so much straighter now that it's almost useless to even try it," Singh says. "If you want to hit a fade, you really have to move it left to right to get something out of it. If you can hit it straight and long, why try to shape it?"
Pavin, Furyk, Perry and other players agree things began to spin toward less shot-making in the mid-1990s, when Titleist came out with the Tour 90 and Tour 100 model balls. Players liked the ball but noticed that a different dimple pattern made it more difficult to fade or draw shots as far as they did.
"It's almost impossible to hit those shots anymore," Pavin says.
The story also looks at modern course design as part of the problem:
Modern architecture, with its forced carries over hazards and elevated greens, also conspired with technology such as cavity-backed irons to force players into an aerial game.
"A lot of courses these days are built for high, hard shots," says Furyk, the 2003 U.S. Open champion. "The guys have the talent. ... It's just not called for as much."
Still, Furyk says fewer players using less imagination means shot-making "is slowly going to diminish over time."
Nicklaus agrees that if players don't face such adversity, they won't develop those skills. To that end, he used thick-pronged rakes that left wide rows in sand traps at his Memorial Tournament two weeks ago. Bunkers truly became hazards rather than a safe haven from thick rough.
"They're quite capable of playing the shots. But they've never grown up having to play shots," Nicklaus says.
Reader Taylor noted that 12 of the first round hole locations are 4 (or less) paces from the green edge.
The former Walker Cupper is the only one to have wondered about the state of the game circa 2013 as it relates to Merion's relevance:
"There's a universal feeling that this is part of our legacy. It's taken a lot of time [to get the Open back], but it's just thrilling. I don't know what's going to happen in the next 7 years, with the ball and clubs, but from a shot-maker's standpoint there's not a better course. It requires skills at all levels."
Not much in Mickelson's press conference, but he did have this to say about the tiered rough:
Q. How much did you end up in the graduated first cut rather than the deep stuff?
PHIL MICKELSON: I remember being in the deepest stuff twice, on 15 and 1. I may have been in it more than that, but I remember those two for sure. That stuff is thick and tough to get it out of. I hit a couple chop shots to get it up and out of that grass and I was okay and I was able to scramble for pars, but it's very, very tough.
The graduated rough, the first cut, you can advance it up by the green. It's hard to hit the green. I don't know if I have actually got one on the surface there. But on the 8th hole I was able to hit it just short of the green and not have too difficult of an up and down, and a couple holes you can get it up by the green, but still, I don't think I ever got one on the green.
After his stellar opening 69:
Q. A couple years ago one of the magazines on this side of the ocean embarked on a be nice to Monty campaign.
COLIN MONTGOMERIE: Yes, it was super, after Bethpage Black.
Q. Are people being nice to Monty?
COLIN MONTGOMERIE: Yes, it was fine. I had a lot of support. We had a nice group, as well, John Cook and David Duval. We had a good group today, and there was no troubles or problems or whatever the case may be. I didn't need my Golf Digest badge, thank goodness. They made 25,000 of them. I don't know why they made so many (laughter). I think they gave me all the spares, and I think there's only two short (laughter).
Jim Furyk after his opening round 70 was asked about the tiered rough:
JIM FURYK: Yeah, it seems fine. The biggest difference to me is it seems like the gallery ropes are much wider than usual, which is kind of nice in the sense that it used to be if you missed a fairway by one or two yards, you had a terrible lie, and if you missed a fairway by 15 yards you could be out there where the gallery trampled it and it would be pretty good, and that doesn't seem to be the case this week. So far I like the graduated. It seems like you get you kind of get what you deserve.And you have to give him credit for being honest about his recent injury:
JIM FURYK: Monday I was in Philadelphia for the Exelon Invitational, it's a tournament that I host. Exelon is my sponsor. We had Adam Scott, John Daly and Sean O'Hair in for a skins game.
I was hunched over a sink after brushing my teeth. I went to take basically Aleve in the morning, and I was kind of in bad posture, kind of hunched over the sink and I kind of tossed my head back in a quick motion, and it seems that I probably pinched a disk or pinched something in my lower neck, upper back area, and when I had done that I kind of felt all the muscles on the left side of my upper back just tense up and tighten it, and it made it real difficult for me to turn head to the left.
And how about this question...
Q. The USGA mentioned that these are poa annua greens. How common is that surface on Tour? Is there anything different or special about how you read these or putt on them? Undulations aside, just the grass itself?
Geoff Shackelford is a Senior Writer for Golfweek magazine, a weekly contributor to Golf Channel's Morning
Copyright © 2022, Geoff Shackelford. All rights reserved.
