[Mike Vegis @ Kiawah]

Great article on why WS, at 7,500 yards is playing easier than Pebble at just over 7,000 yards.  I always thought that, when we hold the 2012 PGA at The Ocean Course, the way to really test the players is to get rid of the rough and have the fairways stimping at around 8...

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/38701832/ns/sports-golf/

[Matt Kardash]

That article is actually really stupid. They are saying Pebble is better because the course played firm and fast and WS is not because it plays soft. Everybody get this in your head right now: Whistling Straits is soft not because of the design, but because they have had a shit ton of water dumped on the golf course. It's really as simple as that. If it didn't rain for a week or so you'd see the ball bouncing everywhere. I don't see how this is so hard to understand.
Goydos said the 4th hole lacked imagination? It's actually probably one of the best holes on the course! Dumbass.

[jeffwarne]

Great article on why WS, at 7,500 yards is playing easier than Pebble at just over 7,000 yards.  I always thought that, when we hold the 2012 PGA at The Ocean Course, the way to really test the players is to get rid of the rough and have the fairways stimping at around 8...

http://nbcsports.msnbc.com/id/38701832/ns/sports-golf/

That and it's rained a ton there......(WS)
and did I mention the greens aren't dead AND bumpy?
a shame the PGA didn't hire the USGA to stop the rain and kill the greens (or just portions of them for those special bumps)


it's really not hard to make a course play hard

[Anthony_Nysse]

I can't say that I've seen Goydos" name as the architect of any golf courses. Until then, he sould be more concerned about making a cut and getting paid, some thing that he didn't do this week.
  As stated, WS is playing soft, but it's not because theyre watering every night. They've have a lot of rain and the wind has laid down. It's does help with you have 2 fog delays-nothing gets to dry out when there is that much moisture in the air.

[Bradley Anderson]

That is an example of brutal journalism right there.

Even when it doesn't rain you can't get anything to dry out. I have never seen such a long continuous stretch of unrelenting high humidity.

[Mike Vegis @ Kiawah]

That article is actually really stupid. They are saying Pebble is better because the course played firm and fast and WS is not because it plays soft. Everybody get this in your head right now: Whistling Straits is soft not because of the design, but because they have had a shit ton of water dumped on the golf course. It's really as simple as that. If it didn't rain for a week or so you'd see the ball bouncing everywhere. I don't see how this is so hard to understand.
Goydos said the 4th hole lacked imagination? It's actually probably one of the best holes on the course! Dumbass.

The course was built on clay.  Had it be on a sand base, it would have drained fine.  When I interviewed Pete a couple of years ago, he said all of the best courses in the world are built on sand...

[Tim_Cronin]

Most of that column – Mark Whicker is a columnist, which can't really be seen when another website picks up a column and puts it online – is spot on. Whistling Straits, as Peter Kostis said Friday, looks like a links and smells like a links, but doesn't play like a links. He mused that, with dry conditions, it would get fast. In that regard, it would play more like a links, albeit one with American-style rough aside the fairways.

I was there in 2004 when it played reasonably fast after a very cold – parka and Packers weather – Tuesday and Wednesday. It wasn't really warm until the weekend. This year, you could grow orchids anywhere in the Midwest. It'll dry out in September, maybe.

I find this by Whicker to be as right, to quote Red Smith, as two martinis at lunch:

"But Whistling Straits does not come close to resembling a links golf course, like the great Scottish courses, or even like Pebble Beach.

"You do not bump-and-run the ball onto the greens. You do not use words like 'imagination' and 'creativity.' Instead, Whistling Straits, with all its sweeping contours and countless bunkers and precipices and menace, is an excessively modern American golf course."

[Phil McDade]

With all the goofy comparisons being made between WS and "links" courses, and how they play (presumably meaning the Open rota courses), I just have to ask -- are the folks playing in the British Open really using the ground game all that much? I honestly don't see much of it -- maybe at St. Andrews, but anywhere else? Muirfield? Turnberry? Birkdale? Carnoustie?

[Gary Slatter]

I thought the column was quite good - WS needs sand to be more links-like and then the rain would not be the factor.   
When I say it needs sand I mean on the fairways, not in the silly "bunkers".
With dry conditions WS could be unplayable.  Not just difficult, unplayable. I have found that UK links courses allow one to play through the air or along the ground under normal conditions, and at certain times along the ground is the only option.  WS would not be possible due to the penal design.

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