MANY OF TODAY’S BUNKERS MIGHT CAUSE WRECKAGE, BUT THERE ARE WAYS AROUND THEM.
Fry and partner Jason Straka recently built 27 holes at Union League National in southern New Jersey. Players who hit into one of the seven bunkers right of the eighth green on the Sherman nine will find themselves standing one shoe hip-high and hitting back up to a flag they can’t see two or three metres above their head. This is only one of many holes here capable of producing these types of calisthenic contortions. The six-metre-deep bunker cut into the rise of the 18th green at Landmand, a sprawling hilltop layout in northeast Nebraska from Rob Collins and Tad King, architects notoriously unsym- pathetic to dictates of fairness, makes Hell at St Andrews look unremarkably secular. The fairway, however, is 120 metres wide, the green is more than 1 400 square metres, and there’s con- siderable runway around the hazard. I was overly aggressive with my second shot and found myself in its bowels. Six strokes later I was out. That was on me. Golfers’ relationship with bunkers is complex. Professionals still expect to play from bunkers that are predictably raked, and consistent, and recreational golfers feel the same. The USGA even modified the rules to allow loose imped- iments to be removed in the sand, per- haps the logical conclusion for where the governing bodies and professional tours have been headed for decades. Had the rule been in place in 2004, Phil Mickelson might own the Grand Slam. Leading by one at Shinnecock Hills in the final round of the US Open, he noticed a small rock behind his ball in the bunker short left of the par-3 17th. The object made the ball come out hot and finish above the hole, leading to a three-putt double bogey. Was this fair? That’s debatable, but the question obscures a more important point, one that Mickelson acknowledged – he should have never been in that position in the first place. The bunker served its purpose. It was a hazard. Hazards should come with a cost. Attitudes of equity have become sec- ondary to the desire for more thought- provoking holes, even if these holes trend a little severe. Designers and de- velopers accept what had always been a cardinal truth, that fairness is a con- struct that’s not written into the histori- cal golf code. Bunkers are not meant to be friendly. The architect’s job is to use them to create interest. It’s the job of the player to avoid them.
Donald Ross and Perry Maxwell has also invigorated bunkers. Macdonald’s pits and embankments at National Golf Links are the model for the provocative hazards found across Old Macdonald at Bandon Dunes. Those at The Lido at Sand Valley, the new replication of Mac- donald’s original Lido (with construc- tion oversight by Doak), were rebuilt in exacting detail. Andrew Green has recently demonstrated how uncompro- mising Ross’ deep, grass-faced bunkers once were at Oak Hill’s East Course in New York and at Inverness Club and Scioto in Ohio, and Gil Hanse’s inter- pretation of Thomas’ filigreed-edge bunkers at Los Angeles Country Club factored heavily in the 2023 US Open. Hitting into hazards like these may extract a half or full stroke penalty, but they don’t make the golf penal. Mimick- ing the character of links, often played in unrelenting crosswinds, requires building fairways with space and bail- out room around the greens, as Hanse pointed out at The Park. The same is true when emulating the classical courses of the 1920s. Those architects understood that golf should be a game of degrees and decisions, and they provided different skill sets ways to play holes. The bunkers might cause wreck- age, but there are ways around them. If anything, designers are becom- ing more irreverent when it comes to equity. Kyle Franz, who learned the craft working for Doak, Hanse and their associates, is one of the profes- sion’s most intuitive sculptors in the medium of sand. His new Karoo Course at Cabot Citrus Farms, built over the top of Fazio’s old Pine Barrens course (itself a revelatory composition of exposed sand, pines and turf when it opened in 1994), is a dizzying, scorched-earth labyrinth of split fairways and alter- nate routes around deep cuts of sand. There’s no legend for how to play it, and the message is implicit: Figure it out.
DEN OF UN-EQUITY Surviving bunkers like The Park’s 17th usually means avoiding them altogether.
or other heavy soils), and the pristine locations – coastal bluffs, sandy up- lands, reclaimed mining operations, inland dune forests – encouraged a style of bunkering that reflected the scope and eccentricities of these sites. NEOCLASSICISM A decades-long movement to recon- struct the original design features of architects like MacKenzie, Tillinghast,
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