"Ian,
I guess a point I was trying to make was--and I say this very carefully--a place in Ardmore, PA called Merion Golf Club.
At Merion, they have this place called the East Course which evolved into some pretty interesting bunkers. Mind you that they had this really quirky head professional and a head greens superintendent that went beyond the normal day to day job requirements of their profession, and created--or maybe a better word would be "refined"-- these magnificent white face-like bunkers into some of the fiercest pits the sport has ever seen.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, this head professional went out of his way with the head superintendent to create these magnificent pits of death which required a certain type of custom maintenance which required throwing the book away when it came to maintaining them. Those bunkers evolved into what they are today."
TommyN:
I sure don't want to divert this particular thread with something else on Merion but the entire evolution of Merion East's bunkers is a long and interesting story over which the era of Richie Valentine and head professional Bill Kittleman was just one of the unique evolutionary eras that lasted for a couple of decades plus. It also seems to be a story about which there is a ton of misinformation on here. It's been told in little dribs and drabs on some of the Merion threads particularly some years ago when there were those really contentious threads on here during their bunker project.
But let's just say there is still a ton of misinformation on here. I don't know whether another thread should be started to tell the entire bunker evolution story of Merion East the way it really evolved over Merion East's entire history or not but the story is definitely no mystery here and at the club.
It is funny how things happen sometimes with information. I did not really mean for Richie Valentine to tell me the story of the entire history of Merion East's bunker evolution but he did anyway one time and it took him no more than perhaps a half hour or so. I even remember where we were standing (next to the 5th tee at GMGC) when he told it to me as we stood there waiting for our superintendent at that time (Mike Smith) to show up.
He went all the way back to what his father had told him about them in the old days when they were being built and perfected over time, to Flynn's roll in their maintenance and look, to the eventual lacy look that was really reached in the 1930s and how they were cut (with a scythe, to the later age of mechanizatized maintenance that changed that lacy look, to the daily maintenance of little collapses that he and Kittleman worked on etc. In that entire story Richie threw in a few other really hilarious stories (which he always seemed to do) about how he went about maintaining that course in a pretty novel and imaginative "little fixes" and in an "in-house" mode that often spilled over from maintenance into architecture.
The point being it was just sort of a "jury-rigged" constant process of almost daily fixing whereby in the end in the late 1990s after a few other supers had succeeded Richie the drainage and sanding in those bunkers was basically just about 100% shot.
You called those bunkers "fierce"? Well, that's a whole other story. I wouldn't really say that (and I should know since I played that course probably hundreds of times in those decades) unless one had no idea how to hit a bunker shot off of what basically resembled a hard pack dirt road----and most golfers don't know how to hit that shot, by the way.
But it's interesting and more than a little ironic that this thread and some of these Mackenzie threads have been posted by Bradley Anderson.
I do not know if Bradley wants to talk about this, at this point, but in my opinion he has some ideas (and he is also conducting his own pretty impressive historical research on maintenance practices and such) on this general subject of bunker maintenance and what might be termed annual architectural maintenance that one might call revolutionary!! It's hard to categorize it but if someone asked me to categorize it I might call it something between what we consider to be annual operations and capital operations with architecture that very well may to some extent preclude the need for the occasional restoration or rennovation or redesign "Projects" that seem to be happening to more and more courses in the last couple of decades.
My point is Merion's bunkers never underwent such a thing in the course's entire history until around 1999 (close to a century).
In my opinion, this is a massive subject and one never really explored and discussed on here or perhaps anywhere else that I know of.
But to do it correctly one really does have to be accurate and honest about the historical realities of the entire evolution of any golf course, and particularly including one like Merion East, and to date that hasn't exactly been the case on here with Merion East's bunkers!