Cross-bunkering - Solution to Distance Issue?

[Chris Moore]

Rather than lengthening a course and tightening fairways, would a course with diagonal cross-bunkering and/or strips of rough and or mounding help solve the distance issue?  At what point would this type of feature be monotonous and detract from the experience of golf?  Would too many people bitch about hitting a "good" shot and ending up in a hazard or difficult lie?  Can anyone name a prominent course where these types of features are used effectively more than just once or twice?

[Jim Sweeney]

An underutilized architectural device on courses of any length, IMO.

Of course, the problem is retrofitting a cross bunker into a hole. given concerns about archtectural integrity and original intent.

[Tim Pitner]

I generally like cross-bunkering/bunkers as centerline hazards, but strips of rough usually look contrived and silly, IMO.  I prefer doglegs to strips of rough as checks on distance.

[Jeff_Brauer]

I think everyone advocates cross bunkers.....about ten yards past their normal drive.  No, wait, I may get that new driver for Xmas and pick up fifteen yards, make that 25 yards past my normal drive.........No wait, I occaisionally really catch one and go 20 yards further, so make that 45 yards past my normal drive.........Hmm, my buddy Fred hits it about 10 yards past my normal drive, and I want him caught, so make that only 40 yards past my best drive.  No wait, 40 yards past my average drive......ah, hell, forget it.

Golf is no fun, even for the long hitters, when the driver is FORCED out of their hands too often.  And, cross hazards will affect other levels of play in unintentional ways.

On the other hand, gradually narrowing the fairway to encourage them to lay up, or create a sucker punch, etc. is probably okay.  So is creating more rolling fairways (domed to put them in the rough, hillier lies, etc.)

Just my opinion.  And I am not a long hitter.

[Pete Lavallee]

Chris,

Kittansett is just such a course; feel free to refer to the course review here on gca.com. They use bunkers and mounds, many of them diagonally oriented to provide that much needed "interest off the tee, for the better player". They are probably a nuisance for golfers of less than average skill.

[Bryan Izatt]

My home course was designed so that 10 of the 13 driving holes have fairways that are islands off the tee and have rough that crosses between the tee and the green.  The rough is usually 2 to 3 inches deep and 50 yards or more long, so it effectively limits the length of the drive and makes the next shot more difficult if you get into the rough.  

There are also 5 holes that have a crossing creek that effectively forces layups for all players.

The course has tees ranging from 5500 to 7300 yards.  No one including Nationwide Tour players can overpower the course.  The course record, by one of the Nationwide guys was 5 under.  The design is effective at controlling distance and scoring.

Almost nobody notices or comments on the crossing rough - it just looks like part of the design.  But almost everybody is frustrated by the difficulty in scoring on the course.  Most players feel beat up by the time they're finished.

Another course I play frequently uses crossing bunkers extensively.   They are usually staggered with the furthest carry being on the line of charm.  Most good players can carry them unless they play too far back. Since the course maxes out at 6900 yards, the cross bunkering would not effectively limit the top players in the game.  As Jeff points out you can't put them at a length that is effective for every type of player given only two sets of men's tees.

The course is also protected by narrow (<30 yard) fairways, doglegs, fescue rough, runoffs and chipping swales around the greens.  This course is a lot more fun to play for most everybody.  But, it can be overwhelmed by a long bomber.

[john_stiles]

Crossing rough is also, like cross hazards, not a solution to the distance issue.

I know you are looking for a reasonable solution on thousands of courses.

Let's see, just take a peek,  what we have in the bag other than the obvious.

1. Make the fairways narrow
2. Make the rough deeper
3. Cut the hole locations closer to the greens' edge
4. Move the tees back.
5. Move the bunkers further from the tee
6. Plant more trees to make the fairway narrower
7. Make the greens firm, about 11 on the old Stimp
7. Make the fairways even narrower
8. Make the rough even deeper
9. Move the tees back again
10. Cut the hole locations even closer to the greens' edge
11. Make the greens firmer, about 13 on the old Stimp
12. Fluff the rough
13. Buy more land
14.  Move the bunkers again
15. Move the tees back one more, last, and final time
16. Move just a few of the tees back just a little bit more.
17. Make the rough even deeper, and have two or three levels of rough, and then somehow cut so that you cannot tell there is a varying rough height
18.  Sell to the developers and move further out of town

I like the obvious solution.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Crossing rough is also, like cross hazards, not a solution to the distance issue.

I know you are looking for a reasonable solution on thousands of courses.....

I presume you are looking at the obvious solution of ignoring the issue?

There was a rerun of Frasier last night which I watched after the Mavs game - Frasier is obsessing over Bulldog getting a man of the year award under false pretenses. His father says,

"Its natural to obsess about things.....the key is to stop obsessing before you yap on and on about it to someone who doesn't give a rat's ass......."

While we are talking about thousands of courses, we are still talking about the problem for about 5% of the players (or 0.5%) and I guess I still wonder why we obsess so much about them.  The problem is very small statistically, but our perception of it is much bigger, since we watch the Tour Pros launch the ball so far every week on television......

[john_stiles]

Jeff,

This is a constant pressure at many, many courses  

In fact, an architect was receiving some education just the other day, about 6:00 pm.  It is nice to share information with the uninformed,  rather than just rant and rave.  

While this 0.5%, or even 0.001%,  the number being tossed around might reflect, I guess,  the number of top pros and amateurs,   the pressure on courses to be lengthened and modernized is great.

These are the great PGA venues, their qualifying venues, the state venues,  the courses used for state qualifying, the city championship venue, the college venues, the amateur tournament venues, the old classics (which some of us admire), and all the courses that want to be,  etc.

There was recently a great secret meeting of the minds. No ?  And one architect was even invited.  

So,  I am not obsessing and would say that some others are simply ignoring the facts.   Of all the public and private courses in town and on my few travels, I have not seen a course that was not lengthened in the last 10 years.

It would be nice   if the architectural brethren would post on the number of times they have not been asked about lengthening a course when renovation/remodeling is done. And, for those new courses,  let's hear about the number of courses, where when you plop down a  6400 yard course plan for the 'owner', that you are not asked about the yardage.

But with the new technology,  I would bet that Kramer would hit the Titleist well past the whale's blow hole.  You see, it is even screwing up some of the old Seinfeld reruns !  So, you are correct !:)


ps.... I don't think anyone is worried about the TV venue courses.  They have made their deal with devil.  Anyway, I only watch the pros about four times a year and never more than about an 30 minutes at any time if the weather is fine.  So I am not worried one, what's the term, !@#$ about the TV venues.

[archie_struthers]

 


The problem, as Jeff Brauer alluded to, is experts are the vast minority of players. Most players are seriously challenged by cross bunkers, and a course that relied heavily on same would be surely not be appreciated by most golfers.

Bottlenecking fairways past the normal hitting zones and peripheral hazards in the same area would seem to be a better option to me.

[Walker_Taylor]

John, You are a bright and interesting fellow to be around. One of the few, whose personality transmits over this wireless venue.
You would like the Wilmington Muni at 6400. See you there sometime...

[Dunlop_White]

Chris, you make it sound like cross bunkers could be recaptured, as an alternative to length, to help defend par. Perhaps,  but I don't believe that Donald Ross meant for his cross bunkers to be unduly penal.

Ross envisioned golf as a ground game. As such, he used the land as an opportunity to place and position bunkers. Ross employed cross-bunkers -- often patterened in diagonal alignments -- to direct golfers in conjunction with the prevailing movement of the terrain.

Sometimes cross-bunkers guided you down a slope or over a ridge to a landing area not readily visible from the tee. Other times Ross intended for golfers to utilize their visual impact to orient and shape suggested shots in conjunction with the flow of the land or the movement of the hole.

For today's golfers, who are so accustomed to playing down the middle, cross-bunkers will once again reveal the importance of positioning shots on outer hole perimeters of golf holes in almost "tic-tac-toe" fashion to gain the preferred angles and perspectives into the green.

In these respects, cross-bunkers are more assisting and helpful than penal -- in that they provide golfers with a visual determination of the land required for thoughtful shotmaking.

[Doug Siebert]

This is a perfect example of why TOC is so great.  The bunkers were not planned based on how far player X hits the ball, or placed carefully on one side or the other of the fairway so only an offline shot will find them.  TOC's fairway bunkers were placed mostly by nature with about as much care as a drunk guy throwing darts left handed over his shoulder, and as a result every player will find himself thinking about bunkers on some holes, and "some holes" changes with the direction and strength of the wind.  Some will point out that TOC can be had by good players these days, but it isn't because of the bunkering but more because of driving distance today 4 of its par 4s are par 3 1/2 and both par 5s are par 4 so when there's nae wind its a par 68.

Back to the issue....there is nothing wrong with the diagonal cross bunker, I like it, but it cannot be used more than a handful of times before it gets old, and I don't believe it should totally cross the fairway more than once if it is at a distance likely to take the driver out of the hands of very many players (and then definitely not done in an attempt to force everyone to play a par 5 as a three shotter, one of my biggest pet peeves)

Don't pick one thing as the "solution", pick and choose based on the way a given idea works with the land and the hole.  Some holes can use a diagonal bunker, some will use a centerline bunker, some may have some drunken dartboard bunkers, some may use ripply land that leads to iffy lies in some areas in leiu of any bunkering at all.  I don't care what you use just for the love of god avoid the formula approach of putting bunkers just in the rough on one side or the other at X yards from the tips based on how far today's long hitters drive, because unless the course is truly F&F most of the time those bunkers are mostly irrelevant because today's ball leads to drives that are almost all carry and no roll, especially for the guys hitting it 310.

[Matt_Cohn]

While we generally agree that the golf ball goes too far, punishing or limiting the player who is skilled enough to hit it long and straight is not the answer. Golf and golf course architecture lose their integrity if we artificially negate the advantages of strength and skill simply to counteract mistakes made by golf's governing bodies.

[Chris Moore]

Matt:  I didn't mean to imply that strong, skilled players should be punished.  I am primarily referring to diagonal crossing hazards like bunkering, rough strips, mounding, and creeks that reward strength when it is applied with precision, but make the golfer think about whether the risk of attempting to carry a diagonal obstacle is worth trying.  It just seems to me that older, landlocked courses like my own have no choice but to work in these centerline hazards to avoid the monotony of 300-yard-drive, pitch, putt.  

[archie_struthers]

I think some cross bunkering is way cool, however I just don't think it should be used to excess.  Certainly Hell's Half Acre (#7 PV) and the like are great strategic and penal architectural features. In fact Pine Valley probably employs a similar strategy as much as any great course, in that many of the fairways end abruptly. This is a consciously designed feature of Crump's work that often frustrated the long hitters, even twenty five years ago. They want to hit their driver! It's definitely true today, and the new tees are testament to this reality..

However to insert mega cross bunkering  to shut down the long hitters might really disrupt the flow of an existing design and should be done judiciously.  Moderation is good!
But most things are best in moderation!!!!

[Matt_Cohn]

Chris,

I'm sure you must be tired of the monotony of those 300 yard drives, pitches, and putts. It must get old for you.

Sorry, just having a little fun.     Only joking!

For pros, anyway, the way to avoid making par 4's pitch-and-putts is to make par 4's 475 yards or longer. That, unfortunately, is the truth! Now, there are other ways to make courses fun, good, challenging, etc. But the best way to keep pro's from hitting wedges into par 4's is to make them almost 500 yards long. Sad, but true. I can't help but think any other "constraints" on driving distance are artificial.

[Jeff_Brauer]

Chris,

The angled cross hazard works as well as ever, but with the ever increasing variety of tee shot distances, must be increased in length to be effective.

BTW, the pure 90 degree cross hazard probably shows up as creeks, as much as anything in new design, since its getting harder to reroute or pipe them and we try to locate them at 300-340 from the back tees.

While at first glance, a cross hazard is merely a stop sign, they can be an interesting strategic dilema if they are used  downwind and downhill where the golfer wants to naturally get as close as possible, but has to downclub for both factors, enough to miss the hazard, but not so far as to be too far from the green.  Mid Length par 5's and 4's (where laying up too short could put you in mid iron, rather than short iron range) work best, IMHO.

Like Archie, I think using them sparingly and well is the key to their acceptability.