[Sean_A]

Jamie:

Although it is a single tournament, the US Open last year at Pinehurst would probably fit your ideal.  

The statistics tend to support your thought that course set up changes the reward for hitting the fairway:

Of the top 10, there were a wide variety of long, short, accurate and inaccurate players.  The median fairways hit rank was 55%, or 36th out of 82 (one fairway better than average for the field).

With respect to driving distance, the median was 297 yards or 17th out of 82.  Those rankings are quite a bit closer than the overall numbers.

Woods, Singh and Carcia were closer to average than they are normally, Woods hitting 2 less than the median, Garcia one more than the median, and Singh, 3 less than the median.

Woods' distance advantage over the median was 33 yards.  Cambell was very close to the median in his driving distance and hit 8 more fairways than Woods.

http://www.usopen.com/2005/news/2005_USOpen.pdf

Sorry if I seem so contrarian, Jason, but I believe the stats paint a different picture of last year's U.S. Open.  Even though Woods hit less fairways than Campbell, he led the field in GIR.  54, if my memory serves.  Campbell hit something like 13 or 14 fewer greens.  Tiger lost because he was the 2nd-worst putter statistically.  Had he just putted average, he would have run away with the tournament.  
 

Jim

My take would be slightly different to yours.  At Pinehurst there were places a player could miss and still hit the green with a grounder.  Tiger is very good at hitting imaginative shots, hence his ability to to hit a fairly high percentage of greens despite missing fairways.  

You are right in that if Tiger would have putted well, he would have won.  Perhaps scrambling from the rough took a mental toll on him.  Who knows?

If courses were designed and setup more like Pinehurst then there would be a lot less talk about the ball going too far.  I watched some of the whatever it is called at The Forest of Arden this past summer.  The players really struggled with a course they would usually murder if it was playing wet.  Being in position was hard lesson to learn for most of those guys.

Ciao

Sean

[Doug Siebert]

Maybe these gen x'ers or y'ers or whatever they are, rebelled against conventional wisdom that hitting fairways is more important than an extra 30. Perhaps they just love to bomb it and found out hitting fairways doesn't matter as much as the old-timers thought.
I know I would rather hit a 7 iron from the rough than a 4 iron from the fairway.

Well, I think that's me.  I'm a Gen Xer and I'd certainly like to claim I rebelled against convential wisdom about driving back even in the mid 80s but it would be a lie, it was lack of skill  I was never able to keep my trajectory down off the tee, even using drivers with lofts as low as 6.5*, nor did I learn to reliably work the ball both ways -- at various times I could count on a draw or fade, but never both.

But I did have the gift/curse of hitting the ball higher than about anyone with the driver, so I adapted to the game as its played by the pros today:  I didn't work the ball around doglegs, I just took straight aim (perhaps favoring my preferred curve of the month) and hit over whatever was in the way, whether it was water, bunkers or tall trees.  I was very long off the tee but not very accurate, so I was basically playing to be "between the trees" rather than in the fairway -- on most courses I was hitting it far enough that even if I found the rough I was fine, I just didn't want to be blocked by trees.  Imagine my surprise and concern to find that the pros have all adopted my strategy!  I should have patented it and extracted royalties from Vijay and Tiger

Really good players always told me that if I wanted to get down to scratch I'd need to learn to work the ball and get a better ball flight with my driver, and I'd need to find more fairways.  Now with technology the game has adapted itself to my way of thinking (but I'm still not scratch, playing a shot from behind a tree is still just as much of a problem with a Pro V1x...)

Maybe that's why I dislike what it has done to the game so much.  Its taken all these weaknesses in my game and made them either virtues or as unimportant as me not knowing how to properly play a stymie.  These are real skills that used to separate me from a good player and no longer do -- like I said, I'm not scratch now so I'm not claiming they were the ONLY things separating me from them.  But clearly this isn't supposed to be the way things work!

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