Whoa Files: How About That Trophy, Nelson Mandela Edition

Mark Garrod reports on the Euro Tour's Nelson Mandela Championship where they played Royal Durban as a 5,594-yard par-65 due to flooding, prompting Jason Sobel to suggest this was the first (albeit unintentional!) professional example of Tee It Forward.

But what caught my eye: the Getty Image accompanying the story.

I thought winner Scott Jamieson was doing a complicated ventriloquist act featuring former President Mandela talking to graduates of the The First Tee and then, well, I realized some South Africans just went an ambitious direction with their trophy design.

Peter Senior (53!) Wins Australian Open!

Absolutely amazing story Down Under at the Emirates Australian Open: Martin Blake reports on the wacky, windy final day from The Lakes where Peter Senior held off Justin Rose and Brendan Jones to become the oldest winner of the historic tournament.

Senior’s two Australian Open wins – he also won at Kingston Heath in 1989 – came 23 years apart, another record. He is the oldest winner of any top-level Australian tour event, having set the previous record himself when he won the Australian PGA at Coolum in 2010 at 51.

“It doesn’t get any better than this,’’ said Senior, a profoundly popular figure in the Australian golf industry over three decades.

He paid tribute to his son, who has carried the bag on the Champions Tour in the United States including two playoff losses. “We finally did it mate,’’ he said. “Mitch’s one percent (cut) is looking pretty good.’’

The tournament website's live blog covered the day beautifully, including posting some photos of the wind damage. The tournament replay on Golf Channel is at 1 ET.

I Was Wrong About One Old Course Change...

In Adam Lawrence's tour with R&A Chief Executive Architect Peter Dawson, there was commentary about the addition of greenside bunkers to the second hole. I have felt this was the most egregious defacing of the Old Course because taking a nice spot to play safe threatened to tamper with one of the game's most amazing green complexes.

Lawrence writes:

We began our tour on the second hole, where two pot bunkers have been added at the front right of the green, and two old bunkers, dating from between 1905-1932, and positioned around thirty yards from the green, have been filled in, and the area behind the new bunkers, to the right of the green, has been gently contoured to make recovery shots from that side a little more difficult. “Those areas were completely flat, and we're certain they had been levelled at some point in the past, perhaps for the construction of a tee. The same is true on some of the other holes where we plan to add contour by the side of the greens,” said Dawson.

I felt the addition of these bunkers was merely a ploy to hide a hole location during the Open to induce more pars and bogies. Lawrence explains:

When the pin is placed on the right side of the green – which it has not been in previous Opens, though it is a common position for daily play – the best line of approach will be from the centre left of the fairway, near to Cheape's bunker, he believes. The remarkable set of contours in front of the green mean that a player who drives up the right could still bank his approach off the slopes and into the pin, but the shot will be extremely difficult. Even from the preferred angle, the opening is narrow.

He's right. If you look at the middle photo posted on Golf Digest's Tumblr account (above) and taken by Matthew Harris, you'll see that the bunkers do not eat into the green complex in a way that will bother the modern professional as I'd feared. Furthermore, we know today's players would rather play a pro-am round lefthanded than hit a run-up shot. And since they all hit lofted shots with great precision, even under firm conditions a normal shot will likely leave them a 25-footer coming back to the hole.

However, these new greenside bunkers added by Dawson and longtime associate Martin Hawtree will almost definitely make the hole harder for everyday green-fee paying golfers. The bunkers will reduce the number of opportunities to avoid the huge leftside contours by playing a safe second shot, therefore adding much needed length to the round and even some unexpected misery that previous generations had not had the privilege of experiencing. 

Maybe when all of flying sand from bunker shots builds up after years of hackers flailing away, the hoped-for effect of a tough tournament hole location will be achieved for those precious four days every five years. More important, this change will help add to the struggles of the people who play the course on a daily basis and just maybe--fingers crossed--ensure rounds are even slower.

So I apologize for getting this one wrong!

Here's a view from the grandstand behind the green during 2010 Open practice rounds showing how badly this green needed to be protected from the onslaught of lazy second shots by everyday hackers:

There have been a couple of good threads about the second hole on Golf Club Atlas, here and this one here started by Bob Crosby about the difficulty of this hole in past Opens.

WSJ: Jack Nicklaus And SNAG

Back in January at the PGA Show, Jack Nicklaus floated some ideas about golf in parks, youth leagues and some other peculiar sound ideas.

But after reading John Paul Newport's story on the Golden Bear's endorsement of SNAG Golf, the ideas become crystallized and make a lot of sense. Throw in the nagging issue of injuries in football (something not touched on here), and there seems to be a genuine opportunity to start kids in golf at a young age thanks to the concept.

Although SNAG golf can be played in any large open area, like a park or a beach, the Nicklaus Learning Leagues will use municipal soccer fields. A six-hole course takes less than 30 minutes to set up. Each player carries a rubber tee pad, to elevate the ball before hitting, and two clubs. One is the "launcher," which kids can use to knock a ball 40 to 50 yards. The other is the "roller," a putter equivalent, for the delicate shorter shots that finally "snag" the ball to an aboveground cylinder at the base of the flag. This so-called Flagsticky is covered in adhesive material.

The Nicklaus Leagues will build on a two-year pilot program in 15 cities run by the National Recreation and Park Association. For 5- and 6-year-olds in the Nicklaus Leagues, the emphasis will be on whacking the ball around and having fun, with snacks essential. Seven- and 8-year-olds will get more instruction and compete with partners in best-ball format against other teams. Nine- and 10-year-olds will use slightly smaller, Super SNAG clubs and balls and compete as a team with stroke-play scoring. Plans are afoot for leagues involving older kids and even adults.

There is also this supplemental video feature with the story.

R&A Chief Architect Dawson: Anchoring Ban Distracted Us From Announcing Most Extensive Old Course Changes In A Century

Adam Lawrence previews a more extensive story he has coming in Golf Architecture following a tour of the controversial renovations with R&A architect Peter Dawson. Apparently, Martin Hawtree is using this time to renovate the Old Course...to be somewhere else. His hands-on attention to detail is quite impressive is it not?

Anyway, seat belts on. It's cringeworthy time...

But, though he acknowledges the communication of the works could have been handled better – “We were perhaps a little distracted by the announcement of the ban on anchoring”

Whoa, whoa, whoa...this renovation was in the works for seven months! It involves the most historic course on the planet and the R&A Chief was distracted by the anchoring ban?

On a serious note, if you are too distracted to publicly share the master plan, the Photoshopped images simulating the proposed changes and from sharing a basic notice to the golfers in town of planned changes as you did in 2009 with the Jubilee Course, are you maybe a little too distracted to be implementing architectural changes to the oldest and most cherished venue in the world of sport?

Anyway, before I interrupted...

Dawson is firm in his belief that the works will improve the course, both for day to day play and in championship mode, and that, far from being untouched for hundreds of years, the course has repeatedly been changed, though he agrees that the current works are the biggest in a century.

A century! Well at least he knows his place in history.

Again, the biggest changes in a hundred years earned a Friday news dump press release followed by work on a Monday morning.

And, although he is happy to confirm that the impetus from the works came from the R&A's Championship Committee, he is at pains to explain that toughening the course for the professionals is not the sole goal of the works. Of the filling up of the hollow in the middle of the seventh fairway, he said: “That is something the Links Trust has been keen to do for many years. It collected so many balls, and was thus so full of divots that it had to be roped off and played as ground under repair for a large part of the year, which was a bit of an embarrassment.”

Now, in the old days, so the legend goes, when divots or rabbits burrowed, they often evolved into bunkers? Robert Hunter wrote lovingly about this in The Links (note to Peter and Martin: it's a book on golf architecture, you might enjoy it.)

So wouldn't a more historically accurate change have been to put a bunker in this 7th fairway hollow? Just saying...

Dawson talks at length--because Hawtree was apparently busy with a more pressing project--about the second hole changes, but that'll have to be in a separate post. (I know you can't wait.)

This is just mind-boggling:

On the fourth hole, the low dune formation that creates the left edge of the fairway in the drive zone is planned to be reduced next winter. “Personally I am not sure about that change, and I'm glad it isn't in the first phase, so we have more chance to think about it,” said Dawson.

The architect doesn't even like his own changes.

“The impetus has come from the greenkeepers – it was covered in rough during the 2005 Open, and the result was that almost nobody tried to hit their drive up the right. To create more width, we shaved the bank down in 2010, but it is very steep, and the greens staff have difficulty mowing it at that height.”

I'm just going to ignore the depressing notion that the greenkeepers are making suggestions related to strategy, and try to figure out which mound, excuse me, "acute spur formation," is under attack here. Dawson seems to first be talking about the large leftside grassy mound (pictured below), but how its height would discourage someone from driving down the gorse-lined right side is beyond me. I'm going with the gorse being the problem in that case.

Your honor, I submit to you a photo from 2010:

4th hole center fairway view (click to enlarge)Then he's talking about the bump short of the green, which I take to be the acute spur formation that the maintenance crew can't mow. Your honor, I submit...

Pretty amazing after 400 years, and "before mowers were properly invented," that this bump was able to be cut. Maybe those modern mowers aren't that proper after all?

I thought this was a stretch regarding the 11th green:

“That pin is only used in winter at the moment,” said Dawson. “It's not just a question of being unusable at Open speeds – it can't be used even when the greens are at normal summer pace. The green would have to be slowed to six or seven on the Stimpmeter to make that pin usable.”

So the greens slow down four to five feet on the Stimpmeter during winter?

And it seems they are accentuating a feature on the Road hole, because that 4.6 scoring average last time wasn't enough.

Lawrence writes:

The widening to the right is frankly relatively uncontroversial – it will now gather shots from slightly further out. To my eye more surprising is the addition of a slight gathering contour on the left side of the bunker, presumably to make the shot to the back left of the green – a route popularised in the 1990s by Nick Faldo – more challenging. This looks fine from the fairway, but from the eighteenth tee, a slight mound can be seen, which appears a little out of place.

Eh no one will notice. It's just the Road hole!

Meanwhile, Graylyn Loomis posted some high quality images of the work in progress.