waned in the decades after World War Two leading to a long period of bun- ker neutralisation. As golfers began to expect fairness and uniformity, courses took pains to groom, soften and even fill in ornery bunkers, many importing designer sand that enhanced the way the ball sat up. Architects didn’t stop building bunkers, but their empha- sis tilted towards utility and aesthetic composition rather than damnation. Recently the cycle of appeasement has shifted. Bunker wickedness is enjoying a resurgence. Architects are embracing the poignancy and peril of penalty as they craft deep, wind- whipped prairie traps, bombed-out cra- ters with vertical façades and cascading landslides of silica that might leave a player one or more stories beneath the green. We behold anew unmistak- able hazards, visually and often physi- cally arresting, with no promise of fair treatment. I asked architect Gil Hanse about the severity of one such bunker, the cavern he and partner Jim Wagner excavated in front of the 17th green at their new public course in Florida, The Park West Palm, a par 3 that ranges from 150 to 80 metres. I could imagine dozens of poor daily-fee golfers, many of whom might not even keep a handicap, blindly flail- ing away in the sand from almost three metres beneath the putting surface. Hanse pointed out all the grass and fair- way to the right of the green and said, at last after some indignation, “If you’re in that bunker, that’s on you.” The impli- cation was clear: Architects today will give you playing options, but they’ll no longer tailor hazards for convenience. THE BRONZE AGE In the beginning it was understood: Bunkers were hazards. Because they occurred naturally in the fields and links where golf developed, bunkers were unkept sandy pits, scars and uneven scabs of earth that were some- times grassy and lined with thorny gorse. In the elongated lines of dunes near the sea they could resemble vast ramparts, possibly unbreachable by club or boot. At the next turn they might come in the form of a crude blowout or gnarly hollow barely wide enough to execute a swing. As golfers trampled common path- ways between the natural landforms
LEADING UP TO THE 1953 US OPEN at Oakmont Country Club, the USGA and club officials clashed over Oakmont’s use of its heavy, wide-tined bunker rakes. The governing body, as well as many US Open participants, com- plained that the deep furrows the rakes made were overly penal and inconsis- tent – one player’s ball, for example, might sit up on the berm between the grooves, presenting an attractive lie, and others settled at the bottom of the rut, requiring uncontrollable explo- sion shots. The club countered: That’s the way it has always been at Oakmont; deal with it. The implication of the USGA’s position, however, was that the US Open might not return to Oakmont if modifications weren’t made. The sides reached a compromise – the fur- rowing rakes would be used in green- side bunkers only, but fairway bunkers would be conventionally raked. The same arrangement was in place when the US Open came back to Oakmont in 1962, but the wheels of bunker equity, even for the membership, had been put in motion, and the heavy rakes became permanent relics shortly afterwards. The retirement of Oakmont’s fur- rows illustrates how attitudes towards bunkers have changed. The toler- ance, and even embrace, that previous generations had for random lies and sometimes impossible recovery shots
– the first “courses” – these bunkers became permanent markers that gained notoriety as vectors of ill consequence, to be avoided at all costs. The most om- inous earned reverential reputations and colourful names like “Himalayas” (St Enodoc), “Sahara” (Prestwick), “Big Bertha” (Royal Portrush), “Soup Bowl” (Rye) and “Hell” (St Andrews). At the Old Course they became anthropomor-
58 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
JUNE 2024
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