Live from the KLM Open - European Tour course maintenance questions

[David Davis]

Interesting day today, which was a first in this way shape and form. First day of the KLM Open at Hilversumsche Golf Club. Spent much of day inside the ropes walking with a group consisting of Kaymer, Colsaerts and Olazabal. Fun to watch all the shots from 15 ft behind or to the side of the guys and see what they experience, felt almost like I was playing. I guess you must get use to it after a while, so much disturbance, phones, feet walking, people talking, cheers going on, certainly raised my level of respect for what the guys are doing. However, now to the point. I noticed that all the rough around the greens had been trimmed from like 5 inches to somewhat of tight lies perhaps 1.5 to 2 inches. When I ran into the guy responsible for the course maintenance I asked him and he said they had to shave everything short from the European Tour as they thought it was too difficult. What's interesting is the club is known not to have a lot of single handicappers, which means these guys are struggling in this stuff all the time and immediately I thought about all the fun and playable discussions going on here and I told the guy they did a great job with the course and should pay attention to the comments from the European Tour people and learn from them to keep the course more playable for it's members. My question to everyone who's had experience with having big events come to your club or perhaps been involved in the maintenance, be it PGA or European Tour or some other tour around the world, have you noticed them insisting on making changes that make the course more playable or easier? What do you think of this? How has your club reacted in the aftermath of the events based on these changes?

[Tom_Doak]

David:

Generally speaking, tournament prep in the US is about making the course harder, not easier -- unless they've had a really wet spring and the rough is just too thick.  Professionals don't like searching for golf balls any more than the rest of us do, and they like losing golf balls even less.

Even before Mike Davis' time, though, there are holes where the set-up people don't like to use the furthest-back tee, because they just think it's too hard, even for the best players.  Butler National never used to use all of its back tees when it hosted the Western Open, for example.  And Pete Dye is famous for cutting the sod off the second-back tee on the fifth hole at Crooked Stick the night before the PGA, to try and force them to use the back tee.  [Seriously.  But they used the third-back tee instead, to spite him.]

[David Davis]

Tom, I'm with you on these points. However, we were not talking about ball losing rough here. This was all cut to about fairway first cut length, instead of being the length of the rough alongside the fairways. In their defense they did tremendously speed up the greens which are tricky and full of little undulations. I'm thinking the rough was so deep that with the fast greens it was not possible to get it close? That's the only answer I can come up with.

[John McCarthy]

To repeat what Tom said above, Butler cut the rough, slowed the greens and use about half the back tees for the Western.  They did all of the above for the club championship.  It was brutal.    

That said, nowadays I would not like such a tough course on a steady diet

[Wayne_Kozun]

We just had a Canadian Tour event at my club (Scarboro in Toronto) and what I found most interesting was the pin placements as in a few instances they opted to stay away from the more difficult pin placements.  The greens were running a bit faster than normal, but not excessively so, but the Canadian Tour staff still erred on the side of being more conservative.

One example is on a par 3 1/2 hole - the 7th which measures about 280 yards.  This has a very small two tier green and for regular play the pin is evenly distributed between the front lower tier and the back upper tier.  A front pin is much harder and would cause one to lay up farther back so as to have a full wedge in to the green.  On all four days the pin was on the upper back tier.  Very few of the players tried to drive the hole - they almost all layed up about 50 yards back.  But pinning the pin on the front tier would likely have caused them to lay up farther back in the fairway to hit a full wedge.  But too much spin on such a shot could cause the ball to spin back off the green if one was not careful.