OTHERWORLDLY Old Macdonald’s bunkers harken to another time and place – the links.
lated, smaller-than-normal buckets that could pivot and rotate to create irregular cuts rather than the straight or curved edges that limited larger machines. This combination makes the bunker appear that it evolved from the site. When golf balls are swallowed by the bushy fescues ringing the edge, being just outside the bunker was sometimes worse than being in it. RENAISSANCE For a long time, bunkers had been tak- en for granted, viewed as perfunctory design ingredients or nuisances to keep golfers honest. The success and popularity of Sand Hills (it won Golf Digest’s Best New Private Course award and ranks eighth on America’s 100 Greatest Courses) gave architects license to break predictable formats and construct meaningful bunkers in every size and shape. Coore and Crenshaw continued to advance their eroded, naturalistic look in the late
and to stop shots from rolling into worse positions. To find a shot in an unraked hazard would be an injustice turning even opponents into sympa- thetic advocates of relief. The real bunker awakening occurred at Sand Hills Golf Club in Nebraska by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, opened in 1995. Their choppy, wind-blown hazards were indistinguishable from the actual blowouts that occur with frequency throughout the inhospitable 52 000-square-kilometre Sandhills region, and they were intensely pun- ishing. Hitting into the wrong part of a bunker carved into the face of a tall dune could destroy a score. At Sand Hills, Coore and Crenshaw’s shapers, particularly Dave Axland, popularised a technique called “chunking” in which native grasses are transported from non-playable areas and planted along the borders of the bunkers to give them a natural appearance. The equipment used included track hoes with articu-
pionship courses in the 1950s and ’60s with the intent of intensifying their shot demands, often by deepening bunkers and using them to squeeze fairways. Dick Wilson fronted elevat- ed greens with high, flashed-faced bunkers as a tactic to defend against a contemporary aerial game powered by an advanced generation of equip- ment technology, though they mostly caught lesser-skilled players. Few would call the bunkers Pete Dye built at courses like Harbour Town, TPC Sawgrass or PGA West congenial, even though players were allowed to ground their clubs in his intimidating-looking waste bunkers. Bunkering throughout the 1980s and ’90s from designers like Tom Fazio, Arthur Hills, Tom Weiskopf and Rob- ert Trent Jones Jr was increasingly fashioned with more helpful, artistic intent: as unreachable aiming points, to aesthetically define fairways and greens, to signal danger areas to avoid
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 63
JUNE 2024
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