middle class, helped create the big- gest boom in golf participation to date and accelerated the evolving view of what was fair and what wasn’t. Fans could read about Snead losing the 1939 US Open by making an 8 on the 72nd hole, including taking two shots to extricate his ball from an insidious bunker, but witnessing this kind of tragedy on the small screen was more viral and ghastlier. The courses that hosted professional events started to be prepped to perfection. Augusta National replaced its tan, powdery bunker sand in 1974 with a new bright white type called Spruce Pine that eliminated the fried-egg lies that were common before. As millions of new golf fans became accustomed to watch- ing famous players hit controlled shots from bunkers like these, they envi- sioned – and expected – the same. The trickle-down standard of fair- ness made its way to golf architecture. To meet rising demand, a frenzy of new
new breed of professionals that includ- ed Sam Snead, Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan helped put professional golf on a different trajectory. Increased interest in professional golf stimulated a growing antipathy to- wards overly penal bunkers as interest shifted from match play to stroke play, the scoring metric of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America, and the calculus of 54- and 72-hole totals. With every swing vital to the outcome of a tournament, the acceptance of a double or triple bogey because of di- saster in an overly severe or unkempt bunker became not just a matter of psychology but of livelihood. By the late 1950s and ’60s, television transformed players like Arnold Palm- er, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player into household heroes and the lens through which many recreational golfers came to know the game. That game looked ordered and clean. Their fame and ubiquity, along with an exploding
construction of primarily municipal and public courses continued through the 1960s. The new demographic demanded courses that were afford- able, easily maintained and not over- whelming to play. This meant shallower bunker slopes and simplified edges built by large machines rather than artisanal labour, with the increased probability that even novice players could advance their ball. At the same time, the courses of the 1910s and ’20s were being renovated and ret- ro-fitted to modern conceptions of playability, their formerly great and terrible hazards mellowed in the name of cost-saving and equity. THE GREAT AWAKENING Not every bunker built on the thou- sands of new courses introduced in the decades after World War Two was designed for convenient upkeep and fairness. Robert Trent Jones famously remodelled US Open and PGA Cham-
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