A
of NEW LOOK The
s if dense rough, narrow fairways and rock hard put- ting surfaces didn’t make the course hard enough, Oak- mont’s superintendent want-
ed to make sure. So on the morning of the opening round of the 1983 U.S. Open at the storied club north of Pittsburgh, veteran greenkeeper Paul R. Latshaw had his crew hose down the entryways into the greens. The effect was to make hitting
greens in regulation virtually impos- sible. Players were faced with the choice of trying to stop an approach shot hit to surfaces that rolled fast and firm and occasionally away from the line of play. Or they could try to guess about landing the ball short in the wetted-down zone, and let it trickle on and stay. In either case, their margin of error was reduced to virtually zero. During practice rounds, the
speculation had been that the narrow- ness of the course would force many players to lay up off the tee with less than a driver, in order to keep the ball in play. The acute course setup didn’t tarnish the glamour of Larry Nelson’s victory. But it did make for one-dimensional golf. Players who missed the fairways simply pitched out, rather than risking an uncontrol- lable shot to the green. Flash forward to June 2014, and
Pinehurst, N.C. The famed No. 2 Course is home
to the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open in back-to-back weeks. Instead of lush, dense green rough, there’s none at all—only scruffy fields of sand, wiregrass and tufty native wild plants, creating totally unpredictable
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NCGA.ORG / SPRING 2014
lies. They might leave a player with a perfect recovery, no choice but to bail out sideways, or a 50-50 guess that could make or break a round. Instead of predictable severity, the guiding philosophy is variety and uncertainty— an element of luck, a measure of skill, and wide-ranging options for think- ing your way around. To make that possible, the design team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw stripped out 35 acres of Bermudagrass rough and made Pinehurst’s fairways about 50% larger. They based their restoration work on maps and imag- ery of the course dating to 1935—the benchmark year Ross completed
CHAMPIONSHIP GOLF
BY BRADLEY S. KLEIN
conversion of the sand-surface putting greens to Bermudagrass. Maps and photography from that era, including the PGA Championship held there in 1936, showed wider fairways and more angles of approach. Since then, hole corridors had shrunken down to bowling lanes. For this year’s Opens, the fairways have been re-established, so much so that they are as much as 50% larger than they were for the 1999 and 2005 U.S. Opens. In a related development, the fairways will look almost starved for water—exactly the way Pinehurst officials and the USGA
Chambers Bay will host the 2015 U.S. Open.
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