The mythical 75/25 bunker

[Jason Thurman]

Is it possible to build a bunker from which a PGA Tour professional cannot get up and down more than 25% of the time, that yet still allows the average 18 handicapper to escape with a single shot 75% of the time?

Are there bunkers in existence that already may meet this set of criteria?

[BHoover]

I'm not sure whether this is the same, but it's somewhat related.  At OSU Scarlet, the renovated fairway bunkers were designed to be very deep and also very long.  The reason was so that college/tournament players would more likely find the far end and deeper end of the bunker and have a more difficult shot to play out of the bunker.  At the same time, the bunkers are long enough that it gives the recreational golfer enough room to play a recovery shot out of the bunker.  At least that's the theory. 

[John Kavanaugh]

Has to do with pin placement and why a guy is an 18 handicapper.  Odd thing about high handicaps, some of them have good hands but are blithering idiots.

[Brent Hutto]

Has to do with pin placement and why a guy is an 18 handicapper.  Odd thing about high handicaps, some of them have good hands but are blithering idiots.

There's one guy at my club who isn't an 18 by any means (maybe a 9?) but he has the good hands all right. Wizard out of bunkers, chips well, putts good until he gets inside four feet. But he can hit a straight ball, a 40-yard hook and a 15-yard slice on three back to back tee shots depending on how he times out that hand action. I saw him hole out a 9-iron for eagle on a Par 5 once, the ball started out 20 yards right of the green, hooked enough to land on the fringe then kicked dead left about 25 feet, hit the stick and dropped.

I wonder if that's what it would have been like playing with Bobby Jones or some of those guys back before golfers figured out that there was a such thing as "too good" hands...

I attended a short game clinic one time and we were practicing getting up and down from 10-20 yards off the green. After an hour or so one of the instructors took me aside and said "I'm sure your wife loves you for your nice, soft touch but when you're playing golf you've got to GET THE DAMN BALL TO THE HOLE once in a while".

[JMEvensky]

Is it possible to build a bunker from which a PGA Tour professional cannot get up and down more than 25% of the time, that yet still allows the average 18 handicapper to escape with a single shot 75% of the time?

Are there bunkers in existence that already may meet this set of criteria?

You want to bifurcate the hazards?

[Josh Tarble]

bunkers you can putt out of.

A tour pro would never resort to a putter from the sand, but that may be the go to from an 18.

[John Kavanaugh]

Once you teach an 18 handicapper to not aim at the hole but go for the fat of the green they will no longer be a 18 handicapper.  I hate the coachable bastards that always place well in the member guests.  They rake and run every damn day they play like a zombie on crack.  Every single one of them can be coached to a 12.

[Mark Pritchett]

I have played with some high handicappers who were quite proficient playing out of bunkers as well as some lower handicaps that struggle out of the sand.  

[Jason Thurman]

Mark, that's interesting, but this thread is not about those people. It is about the AVERAGE 18 handicapper, and a PGA Touring professional.

It is in response to the notion expressed in another thread that bunkers are not difficult enough for pros. The tour sand save percentage is right around 50%. How much more difficult can bunkers reasonably get before they become completely unplayable for member play? The bunkers at Valhalla are already six feet deep or more, yet those same bunkers elicited complaints from many that they were too easy. My 24 handicap buddy couldn't believe how the pros were disappearing into the greenside bunker at the first hole. He may never have seen a deeper bunker in person. Having seen him play, he would certainly take 2 or 3 shots to escape, on average. Just how badly are we willing to screw the hacker so that we can feel satisfied that bunkers are playing as hazards for pros?

[Sean_A]

The answer is to make bunkers like real hazards - one where a penalty drop is allowed.  You can make the damn things as hard as you like if the slashmasters can take a drop.  As always though, the difficulty of the bunkers should have an inverse relationship the the number of bunkers.  There isn't much point in 100 bunkers let alone 100 very difficult bunkers.

Ciao

[Mark Pritchett]

Jason,

A sand save takes two shots (usually) why all the focus on the bunker one, green difficultly and putting stats should matter equally in the equation.

Mark

[Mark Bourgeois]

Forget about the bunkers (mostly) and focus on green slope, contour, and speed. But who cares how floggers play anything other than flog courses, anyway? I like how in the case of Valhalla they were given a flog course to ruin however they saw  fit.

[A.G._Crockett]

Has to do with pin placement and why a guy is an 18 handicapper.  Odd thing about high handicaps, some of them have good hands but are blithering idiots.

Correct.  Sand saves have at least as much to do with pin positions than the bunker itself.  Good players simply don't hit the ball into particular bunkers, depending on where the pin is, while high handicappers constantly put their ball into the wrong place.

Consider that the sand save leaders on Tour get up and down nearly 2/3rds of the time, and the WORST on Tour nearly a third.  You might be able to build a bunker that has a 25% rate for Tour pros TO CERTAIN PINS, but you'll never know if it works because they simply will NOT hit the ball there.   

As to the high handicappers, their score on a hole after going into a bunker also has more to do with what happens AFTER they get out than getting out itself.  They short-side themselves and then three-putt, or go over the green and have to chip back, etc.  Even if they get out in one shot, the fun is just beginning.

The longer I play golf, the more I come to realize that the key to a great short game is not missing in places where I can't get up and down.  If I can bump and run a 7 iron, I've got a 50-50 chance of getting up and down.  If I end up with a lob wedge in my hands, whether in or out of a bunker, my stats go off a cliff. 

Long way of saying that even if you CAN design/build such a bunker, it won't matter.

[Garland Bayley]

Is it possible to build a bunker from which a PGA Tour professional cannot get up and down more than 25% of the time, that yet still allows the average 18 handicapper to escape with a single shot 75% of the time?

Are there bunkers in existence that already may meet this set of criteria?

Bunker in front of 1st green of Shorty's at Bandon Dunes probably meets your criteria. I can escape from it 100% of the time, while pros would be hard pressed to get up and down from it. I believe it is a bit of a replica of a bunker with the initials D. A.

[Josh Smith]

Off the top of my head.  Doesn't NO RAKES pretty much get you there. 

Josh

[George Pazin]

What makes you think an 18 expects a bunker he can get out of 75% of the time? Do 18s who venture overseas complain that the bunkers are too hard?

[Brent Hutto]

George,

There are bunkers on certain links courses I treat like water hazards. Except (as Sean is fond of pointing out) they are more penal than water hazards because if I hit one there it is stroke and distance as the only alternative to trying to play a shot that I simply do not have in my bag at all. So for those bunkers I play 30-40 yards clear of them, which can in effect cost me nearly a full stroke in order to avoid an X.

Also to again channel friend Sean, if a course has several holes that each have one or two such bunkers then hey it's just a tough-ass course and those holes I'm playing chicken-golf. Give most or all of the greens on a course two or three such bunkers and I'd just as soon play elsewhere.

And here's the hell of it. Many of those nigh inescapable avoid-at-all-cost bunkers for my game would simply mean playing out sideways or something and then getting down in two for an elite player.

[JMEvensky]

George,

There are bunkers on certain links courses I treat like water hazards. Except (as Sean is fond of pointing out) they are more penal than water hazards because if I hit one there it is stroke and distance as the only alternative to trying to play a shot that I simply do not have in my bag at all. So for those bunkers I play 30-40 yards clear of them, which can in effect cost me nearly a full stroke in order to avoid an X.

Also to again channel friend Sean, if a course has several holes that each have one or two such bunkers then hey it's just a tough-ass course and those holes I'm playing chicken-golf. Give most or all of the greens on a course two or three such bunkers and I'd just as soon play elsewhere.

And here's the hell of it. Many of those nigh inescapable avoid-at-all-cost bunkers for my game would simply mean playing out sideways or something and then getting down in two for an elite player.

Why would you call this chicken golf? Sounds to me more like playing to your strengths/away from your weaknesses.I always thought this was called strategy.

Elite players do the exact same thing.

[George Pazin]

George,

There are bunkers on certain links courses I treat like water hazards. Except (as Sean is fond of pointing out) they are more penal than water hazards because if I hit one there it is stroke and distance as the only alternative to trying to play a shot that I simply do not have in my bag at all. So for those bunkers I play 30-40 yards clear of them, which can in effect cost me nearly a full stroke in order to avoid an X.

Also to again channel friend Sean, if a course has several holes that each have one or two such bunkers then hey it's just a tough-ass course and those holes I'm playing chicken-golf. Give most or all of the greens on a course two or three such bunkers and I'd just as soon play elsewhere.

And here's the hell of it. Many of those nigh inescapable avoid-at-all-cost bunkers for my game would simply mean playing out sideways or something and then getting down in two for an elite player.

What Jeff said.

I guess we're very different in what we expect. I expect only to be able to find my ball and play it. I'd rather take an X from a bunker than figure out my drop from a water hazard.

The former shows me where I need to improve, the latter shows me? How to measure? How to drop?

I know how to measure. I know how to drop.

[Phil McDade]

Jason:

Maybe Big Bertha, the rather large bunker that guards the right front of the green in this thread?

http://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,37107.0.html

I can see getting out of it, for an 18-handicapper, if you don't care about your score on the hole. But depending on the pin position, that can be a very tough up-and-down, because any pin cut toward the front of the green will leave a dicey downhill put once you emerge from Big Bertha's jaws.

[Brent Hutto]

I need no information on the parts of my game that need improvement, believe me.

I know you guys are much more into the "Oh my god, that was awesome I really got screwed and had to take an X" kind of thing than I am. I'm sure it makes you much more complete and highly evolved as golfers and as persons.

And as I say, I'm cool with a few such features. But I don't play courses at the beach that alternate between water right/OB left and water left/OB right for eighteen holes. Nor would I choose to play a links course with, to use Sean's example, 100 harshly penal bunkers scattered throughout.

All of which is just personal preferences. But the point is, there is no inherent superiority of a pot bunker that I can't get the ball out of versus some other bunker that takes a good swing (or maybe two attempts) for me to get out of versus some other bunker that I can knock the ball onto the green as often as not. More penal is not better.

In fact, that's my dispute with the entire tenor of these discussions. For some of you guys, if it's a bunker then apparently the more penal the better. Where does that come from? I guess you just make it up and repeat it often enough that it starts to seem like a Rule of Golf.

I like variety. I think encountering the following scenario is absolutely ideal:

1) There's one side of a green protected by a deepish/steepish bunker
2) One side protected by thickish rough
3) Another protected by the fact you're short-sided and the green runs away
4) And none of the three options is clearly an absolutely don't-go-there-ever penal hazard

In that scenario, you have to guess at your likely misses and you have to know your own game in terms of which miss might be somewhat more or less challenging than the others. Taking that bunker and making it water-hazard-penal for a 16-handicapper does not improve the setup at all. It both makes the hole more frustrating when you end up there anyway and it presents one less option.

Whatever happened to "recovery shots are one of the most exciting elements of the game". Seems I used to hear that said around here all the time. Now it's been drowned out by a bunch of whining about how Tour players get out of bunkers too easily and we ought to take away the rakes, blah, blah, blah.

If you really want multiple sides of the green surrounded by must-avoid hazards for elite players than you're looking at a steady diet of island greens. Just build the 17th at Sawgrass a dozen or so times and put it around all the Par 5's and half the Par 4's. They won't be getting up and down from that water. If you're going to have a bunker protecting a green (or a side of a fairway) then presumably the architect INTENDS for it to have a certain non-extreme cost to the player who hits his ball there. For that cost to be a 50/50 chance of an up-and-down for the best players in the world does not mean the bunker is broken. It means that's a spot they can get up and down from half the time. Nothing more or nothing less.

To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a bunker is just a bunker.

[Jason Thurman]

What makes you think an 18 expects a bunker he can get out of 75% of the time? Do 18s who venture overseas complain that the bunkers are too hard?

All the ones I've met do. I actually talked with a bunch of guys at my club about their UK trip just recently. Their verdict on the bunkers: "It's fun to play like that once in a while, but those things are too tough to play from regularly." This was a group of six ranging from a 4 handicap to a 15.

Does anyone know the typical sand save percentage at the Open Championship?

Off the top of my head.  Doesn't NO RAKES pretty much get you there.  

Selling out the basic etiquette of cleaning up after yourself and leaving the course better than you found it for the groups behind you seems like a terrible thing to do just for the sake of making golf harder for professionals. We could also do donuts on the fairways and beat the hell out of the greens with 5 irons if we want to toughen the course up for the pros, but we destroy the dignity of the game in the process. Also, have you ever seen an 18 handicapper hit out of a bunker after he sees a footprint inside a five foot radius of his ball? They start complaining long before they make the first swing, and continue all the way through dropping the ball in their pocket.

[Garland Bayley]

Jason:

Maybe Big Bertha, the rather large bunker that guards the right front of the green in this thread?

http://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,37107.0.html

I can see getting out of it, for an 18-handicapper, if you don't care about your score on the hole. But depending on the pin position, that can be a very tough up-and-down, because any pin cut toward the front of the green will leave a dicey downhill put once you emerge from Big Bertha's jaws.

That's a puny Big Bertha. Here's the real one



The 18 handicap can putt out of this one.

[Brent Hutto]

Selling out the basic etiquette of cleaning up after yourself and leaving the course better than you found it for the groups behind you seems like a terrible thing to do just for the sake of making golf harder for professionals. We could also do donuts on the fairways and beat the hell out of the greens with 5 irons if we want to toughen the course up for the pros, but we destroy the dignity of the game in the process.

I sometimes wonder if every single person on the planet who looks at a smoothly raked bunker and thinks "Man, wouldn't this shot be more fun if the sand were all chewed up and not raked" is here on this forum. I've never met such a person in Real Life (i.e. outside of GCA-related meetups).

[Phil McDade]

How about Big Mouth? The departed Ryan Farrow suggested this may be the toughest up-and-down at Oakmont; can a bogey golfer get out of it 3/4s of the time? I wonder....

http://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,28521.0.html