Dull Viewing Alert: Canadian Open Drenched In Rough

Brad Ziemer reports that Canadian Open site Shaughnessy has harvested a big rough crop and they're quite proud of it. A week after a successful Open Championship in large part because rough was not a factor, this figures to make the Canadian a major snoozefest.

Luke Donald, who generally endorses narrow fairway, high-rough setups:

“A little bit,” he said. “It takes the skill out of it a little bit. You are grabbing the same club around the green — lob wedge — and it’s the same shot. There’s not too much imagination.”

Anthony Kim said it was 6-7 inches in spots and of course, Geoff Ogilvy added the event to his schedule because of good player reports and sounds like he's regretting it.

“You set your golf course up to show its strength and encourage the best players in the world to show how good they are,” he said. “Sometimes if you get too narrow and too much rough, you restrict some of the best golfers’ recovery ability.”

Ogilvy, an articulate 34-year-old Australian whose seven PGA Tour wins include the 2006 U.S. Open, doesn’t buy into the theory that high scores necessarily make for a good golf tournament.

“I don’t think difficulty has anything to do with the quality of a course,” he said. “I don’t think a golf tournament is any less a championship if guys are shooting 65 every round. I don’t think that undermines the quality of a golf tournament.

“It seems to be sometimes thought that a single-digit, under-par score must have been a higher-quality tournament. I don’t 100 per cent agree. Look at Augusta this year, everybody nearly birdied every hole on the back nine and it was one of the best tournaments ever.”

Rob Barr, Shaughnessy’s course superintendent, sounds excited about his crop.

“I’m very pleased with where we are rough-wise,” Barr said Wednesday. “There hasn’t been anything negative about the rough. They (players) love Shaughnessy like they did in ’05. It’s tougher than it was, more polished than it was in ’05.”

Barr said the rough is more consistent and uniform than in 2005, and “contours” of rough around the greens are the same as last time.

“We’ve just been able to combine more rye into our rough, which has made it thicker,” he said. “The weather we’ve had . . . it’s been a rough-grower’s paradise.”

I'm sensing prime nap inducement opportunities!