Highly-entertaining golf becomes a crushing bore
John Huggan
IF this US Open Championship is an accurate indication of the future of golf at the highest level, I’m glad I was around for some of the past. This hasn’t been golf; not proper golf; not imaginative golf; and not golf that is any fun to watch.
Of course, we should not be that surprised. The US Open has long been a test of grinding rather than golfing. But, that said, the traditional bloody-mindedness of the United States Golf Association has been exacerbated by their inability - along with the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews - to curb the advances in club and ball technology over the past decade.
With shots travelling so much farther and straighter than even five years ago, Bethpage’s Black course, in response, has been all but covered in long grass. Heavy rough, golf’s most boring hazard, has become the last refuge for the USGA and a tacit admission of their failure to fulfil their very reason for existing. Supposedly charged with preserving golf’s previously-peerless integrity, they have, through a complex mix of incompetence, ignorance and inattention, allowed equipment manufacturers irrevocably to alter the professional game. And not for the better.
For the very best players, new technology in the shape of increasingly-powerful metal-headed drivers and ever more efficient balls, has rendered many of our most revered venues all but obsolete. Over the past few years, even Augusta National and our own Old Course at St Andrews have been stretched to breaking point.
So it is that the custodians of the Open Championship and the US Open - the aforementioned R&A and USGA - have increasingly opted for more ludicrous and lengthy course set-ups. Bethpage this weekend measures 7214 yards, making it the longest course in US Open history. Only a single hole, the 14th, is less than 200 yards long.
Had the USGA and the R&A stayed ahead of Titleist, Callaway and Taylor Made, and decreed that clubs and balls could not produce anything like the distances they do today, there would have been no need for such extreme measures.
And things are going to get longer. When this championship visits Oakmont in 2007, the competitors will be asked to play a 505-yard par-4. Torrey Pines in San Diego, where the event will probably go the following year, can already be stretched to a mind-boggling 7700 yards. Where will it end?
Even worse than mere yardage, however, is that this 102nd US Open has been played on an incredibly-difficult, narrow and sadly one-dimensional golf course. In terms of shot-making, the tournament has been a crushing bore.
"They [the USGA] take your decision-making away," says former European Tour professional Jay Townsend, who is here working for Radio Five Live. "There is no imagination. It’s penal golf, not strategic golf. It’s fun to watch players decide which club to use, which shot to play. Here there is none of that. There is only one shot every time."
Another former European Tour professional, Australian Mike Clayton, is covering the event for the Melbourne Age newspaper. His reaction to his first US Open has been one of tired resignation.
"The course set-up totally dictates to the player where he has to go. There are no options. There is only one shot you can play if you miss a fairway or a green. Get the lob wedge out. And, worst of all, many of the bunkers are in the rough.
"It shocks me that the bunker’s sphere of influence is so small. I like to see an errant shot encouraged into the sand, which doesn’t happen here. The long grass stops the ball. So the bunkers are havens, not hazards.
"The long grass eliminates any element of strategic play. You don’t want to go close to the bunkers. If you drive close to sand, you really should be in the perfect spot. But if you do that here, you’re in the rough. So you don’t need to go near the bunkers. The long green grass, not the sand, is the primary hazard."
The man responsible for the golf course is architect Rees Jones, the so-called ‘Open doctor’. Since 1988, Jones has ‘restored’ six US Open venues. It was he, egged on no doubt by the USGA, who came up with this abomination.
"Why are the bunkers in the middle of the rough?" he asks rhetorically. "Good question. It’s that the bunkers aren’t that important in a US Open set-up. The rough is much more important. The way players are now, fairway bunkers are not enough of a deterrent. Accuracy and now length are the things that make this course difficult."
Difficult, yes; interesting, no.
Clayton, though, observes: "What has been lost here at Bethpage is imagination and strategy. Golf is so much more interesting when a player stands on the tee, and doesn’t know what to do. But it’s obvious here. All the players have to do is drive on to the fairway - not any particular side, just anywhere on the fairway. In fact, they have been better off on the wrong side of the fairway rather than missing the correct side by a yard.
"Whenever they have missed a fairway, all they have been allowed to do is advance the ball to the next portion of fairway. They can’t go in the rough and try to hit the ball on to the green. Everything is dictated to them by the golf course."
As an indication of what we are missing, think of St Andrews. Nothing is dictated to the player there. He can do whatever he wants. He can drive off with a putter if he wishes. He can play whatever shot he thinks is best suited to the terrain in front of him. Take the last hole: golfers of any standard can play it with any and every club in the bag.
Here, of course, the USGA want the ability to drive the ball into a 30-yard wide gap to be part of the test. On the surface, that sounds sensible. But it isn’t. The problem is purely one of execution. Plotting the most advantageous route to the hole doesn’t enter the equation.
The counter-argument to the ‘US Opens are boring’ mantra is that this sort of ‘golf’ is all about handling yourself mentally, staying patient, waiting for your chance.
"Patience is the wrong word," says Rick Smith, who has coached Lee Janzen to two US Open wins, and also works with Phil Mickelson. "It’s perseverance. You have to forget fairness. It isn’t fair. It’s not supposed to be fair. So you’re not going to like it. But you have to do it."
Few can, of course. In truth, the average eight-handicapper could not play Bethpage. He couldn’t break 100. At perhaps three holes, he could not even reach the fairway. The carry at the 10th, for example, is more than 250 yards. In flat calm conditions last Thursday morning, five of the first nine drives did not reach the short grass. Even career tee-shots from Hale Irwin and Corey Pavin, both past winners of this championship, would have left them hacking out to the fairway. Madness.
Perhaps Nick Price put it best. Before the championship had even begun, the former Open and USPGA champion said that he "couldn’t wait to come back and play this great course when it is set up properly".
Maybe in a month or so, Nick, after the mowers have done what is their long-overdue work.