Jeff Loh:
That's my point entirely.
George Bahto has stated that PN bunkers by Macdonald/Raynor are always about 75-80 yards short of a green.
Obviously, on some holes of particular lengths that definitely leads me to question exactly what their strategic value and purpose was supposed to be and for whom?
The answer I have come up with, and on close and careful consideration
, is that even the best architects did not always use hazard features and such for only strategic reasons.
I think it was Geoff Shackelford who once said that people like most on here are always trying to assign some special strategic reason for each and every architectural feature including hazard features such as bunkers, when the truth is back in that day some of those architects where simply trying to develop fill from as near as possible to build something else like a green.
If that was true, then the converse is probably true too----eg sometimes they had excess fill hanging around a particular spot so why bother to cart if off the site or use it somewhere else at a distant part of the course if they could just dump it and use it right there?