"Myths About Bunkers"

[David_Tepper]

Per Jim Utbina:

http://www.linksmagazine-digitalissues.com/linksmagazine/august_hotlinks?folio=6#pg7

[Kalen Braley]

His Response to #2 and 3 seem a bit contradictory to #1.
 
He claims that bunkers being there to penalize is a myth, but then in #2 and #3, basically says bunkers should penalize by not giving the player a direct shot and not being maintained.

[Paul Gray]

Kalen,


He says that the myth is that they are only there to penalise. He says they are not, as he's right. The primary purpose of a bunker is to make the golf make a choice. That, of course, assumes width is present.

[Niall C]

Paul


Why do you need width ? The golfer might have the choice of laying up or going over.


Niall

[Bill_McBride]

Paul


Why do you need width ? The golfer might have the choice of laying up or going over.


Niall

Width gives the shorter player an option other than laying up.

[Niall C]

Bill


That is undoubtedly true but my point was you don't need width to provide options.


Niall

[Brent Hutto]

Well by that reckoning a pond in front of a green on a Par 5 is a strategic feature, right?


Hard to see much strategy involved. If you're standing on the 200 yard marker either you can make the 180 yard carry over the pond or you hit a sand wedge and lay up short of the pond.


If "strategic" is going to have any real meaning I'd think we should reserve it for features that offer options, not for do or die hazards. Cross bunkers without sufficient width to play to one or the other side are equivalent to water hazards fronting greens IMO.


Which isn't to say they shouldn't be used. But we need some nomenclature to distinguish a fairway bunker that must be played over from one that can either be played over or played around. I'd suggest "penal" and "strategic" as obvious choices.


P.S. And yeah, I understand that entire holes are supposed to be deemed "penal" vs. "strategic" and that strategy starts all the way back at the tee, yada, yada, yada. There is still a difference.

[Kyle Harris]

After a heavy sigh, I enter this thread.

Strategy is the application of shots to score. Strategy, therefore, begins and ends with the golfer and that golfer's particular skills and bag of tricks.

If I were to hone a sufficient bunker game such that I could reasonable score well from the bunker, I could employ a strategy that complete negates the bunker from decision making.

Every hole has options, starting with the up-to-fourteen contained within your bag.

We do ourselves, and the art as a whole, a disservice by attempting to apply broad-based definitions as concepts.

Mr. Urbina's ideas are extremely fruitful for discussion; we know, for example that Hugh Wilson and William Flynn disagreed with the idea that bunkers should be so penal so as not to be able to advance the ball. Bear in mind that Mr. Urbina takes the extreme point of view by mentioning the counter to his idea is a golfer advancing the ball all the way to the green.

[Brent Hutto]

Kyle,


So would you consider the fairway bunkering under, let's say, a typical modern Tour event presentation to be strategic in the most player-specific sense of the word?

For a Tour player who drives the ball to 175 yards from the green, he'd certainly rather be on the fairway than in a large bunker with perfectly groomed sand. But he will generally play a shot from the sand to the green and have a good chance of success. So his player-specific strategy is going to consider the fairway as most desirable, the groomed bunker as making birdie much more difficult but still not taking par out of play and the rough a few yards from the bunker to be a half-shot or more penalty. He can take all of these estimates into account when trying to decide whether to play away from the bunker vs. running a chance of being in it.


For myself, driving into a fairway bunker 175 yards from the green is a different question. Being in fairway that far out I'm still not likely to make birdie but par ought to be very doable. From the bunker I am 100% totally playing for bogey with a one-putt par of some kind being a faint hope. And from any sort of deep rough near the bunker I'm hacking out and not even certain to attain that bogey.


So deploying that bunker "strategically" in terms of the overall shape and length of the hole, the contours and receptiveness of the green and the greenside bunkering is hard to predict comprehensively for a range of players encompassing a 17-handicapper, a good amateur player and a Tour professional.


Now let's bring in a herd of buffalo to trample the bunker, remove the rakes, forbid players from smoothing it after play and basically turn it into a no-go zone everyone from me to Tiger Woods will avoid at all costs. It the functional equivalent of a small water hazard. To my mind you've turned the interesting strategic ramifications of a player's skill at hitting fairway bunker shots into a simple penal feature. Yes you could still provide "strategy" by placing it to one side of a narrow fairway. But not much differently than having water or OB there.


So that, to me, seems the fundamental question. Do we want bunker hazards to be somewhere in the list of disastrous places to avoid hitting the ball (along with knee deep rough, water hazards, OB and miscellaneous desert/gorse/rock type nightmares) or do we want bunkers to be a discrete type of feature that is, if not innately "strategic", then "strategic" in a complex way because of the special technique that can be developed to minimize the cost of bunkering a shot? And I'd say the maximum interest is produced by raking and maintaining them so that skill can be brought to be bear AND using them with width to produce more different fractions of a stroke advantage to the player's choices (and again, those fractions of a stroke depending on the player's skill, ball flight and normal shot shape).

[Niall C]

Well by that reckoning a pond in front of a green on a Par 5 is a strategic feature, right?


Hard to see much strategy involved. If you're standing on the 200 yard marker either you can make the 180 yard carry over the pond or you hit a sand wedge and lay up short of the pond.


If "strategic" is going to have any real meaning I'd think we should reserve it for features that offer options, not for do or die hazards. Cross bunkers without sufficient width to play to one or the other side are equivalent to water hazards fronting greens IMO.


Which isn't to say they shouldn't be used. But we need some nomenclature to distinguish a fairway bunker that must be played over from one that can either be played over or played around. I'd suggest "penal" and "strategic" as obvious choices.


P.S. And yeah, I understand that entire holes are supposed to be deemed "penal" vs. "strategic" and that strategy starts all the way back at the tee, yada, yada, yada. There is still a difference.

Brent


Feel free to stick your yada yada up where it belongs. And yes a pond in front of a green can be strategic depending on how it is used, shape of the green etc. You need a degree of penalty to create strategy. That degree of penalty might only be having to play off a tight lie to an unreceptive green but that still might be a degree of "penalty" compared to other options.


Using the pond in front of the green scenario, try playing the 17th hole at Valderrama and tell me strategy doesn't come into play when approaching that green.


Niall

[Tom_Doak]

Cross bunkers without sufficient width to play to one or the other side are equivalent to water hazards fronting greens IMO.

I don't agree with this, because the nature of the penalty is different.  With a cross bunker, you are weighing whether you think you can recover from it and get down in two more strokes, or three, or four.  You're more likely to take on the bunker if you think there's a reasonable chance of making it over, and if you think you have some chance of recovering anyway.  A pond is different by its nature, there's no way it makes sense to gamble on hitting over a pond unless you're in a match and your opponent is already close to the hole.