After being at CCC all week, I packed it in and watched the Sunday round on TV. Too hard to see the leaders when the crowds start concentrating around them, and as has been noted the back nine is a tough walk -- hilly, lots of crossing, not that many places to get a good view. Best way to see golf on the back nine is from the grandstands. One little bonus of having to wait at the crossing on No. 18 on Friday -- I saw a player named Gonzales hit a wicked shank on his approach to 18. It was a full shot, and a full shank. Some guy waiting beside me said, "He just gave us ordinary golfers something to smile about." Then, proving he wasn't ordinary, Gonzales managed to make a bogey.
Generally, though the scoring went down, the golf got less interesting IMHO as week went on. With the soft greens, the green light was on, and the kind of caution that I noted in an earlier post, with players showing respect for the course, using different clubs off the tees to stay out of the rough, varying the kinds of approach shots and pitches -- all that went by the boards. They obviously felt free to attack. The penalty just wasnt there for a missed fairway. Prime example -- McIlroy on No. 11 on Saturday. He pulled the tee shot into the left rough but his approach went straight over the flagstick . . . and stopped. Drained it for birdie. Normal Open conditions, that approach would have been way past the hole.
Could it have been avoided? Could the Setup Wizard have done things differently to insure a firmer surface? I don't know enough about agronomy to have an informed opinion, but I have to say that Davis seemed to tempt the fates by rebuilding the greens. During the hot spell before the Open, they had to be babied, and they were a lot more saturated coming into the week that was ideal. Then the rains started to fall and they never had a chance to dry out. Would Davis have done anything different with mature greens? He's said he wouldn't, but still. This whole Open setup scenario has reached the point where micromanagement is SOP, and that's asking for trouble.
Re the golf course design: the routing, which mostly dates back to RTJ, has a nice rhythm (I've played CCC a couple times and this was my impression as a player as well as observer of the Open). Rees mostly stuck with the routing in the major overhaul back in the 1990's, and the changes since then -- notably the new 10th -- have been improvements. It's a course that gives you a few breaks on the front side and squeezes you hard on the back. Some of the bunkers are a lot deeper than they look on TV!
But there is a sameness to many of holes. In part this is because the original tees and greens were sited on high ground and have remained there; thus, on several holes, you hit from an elevated tee to a fairway below you, then play the approach uphill. One thing that Rees Jones did was lower a bunch of greens to reduce the amount of blindness on the approach shots, and shape the fronts to provide more visibility.
One result of this was that the lower greens ended up in bowl-like setting, lower than their surrounds. You see that over and over at CCC -- the green surface, falling off at the edges, and then the ground slopes up again into the mounds that encircle the greens. It is not only repetitious but looks awkward and disjointed. As far as playability is concerned, this kind of green complex isn't too hard on the player who misses by a little -- his ball is just off the green and he has a straightforward, slightly uphill chip/pitch. Miss by a lot, though, and now the ball is on the side of a mound, a downhill lie, and a far more difficult shot.
Obviously, not all the green complexes fit that description -- the 6th, 10th, 16th, and 18th come to mind as exceptions. It's one reason why those holes as among the most memorable.
The greens themselves, as many have pointed out, are clearly segmented -- again, a design that challenges the better player but tends to penalize the rest of us. Not much subtlety in the way these transverse ridges are incorporated into the greens. Most of them standout clearly, even on TV -- and that's saying something, since TV tends to flatten greens. They started to remind me of old mattresses where you could clearly see the troughs where people had slept for years -- and the ridge in between.
Even with all of the above, I end up thinking that Congressional is a pretty good modern course. It's tough for members, and with less rain and firmer greens I think it would have shown itself as tough Open venue, too.