1. A big shout out to Brian Gaffney, our head Pro who accomplished a pretty remarkable feat as the only Club Pro to play the weekend.
2. Can they please fill in about 750 of those 1000 bunkers? The ones that are only in play for resort golfers?
3. Why is this course so GREEN and SOFT?
4. Will the USGA ever come to terms with putting a stop to the golf ball arms race?
5. Is it possible that Chambers Bay looks less "faux"-links than WS does?
6. There are some remarkable talents out there right now. The next few years will rival the Nicklaus Watson Trevino Miller Floyd Weiskopf, etc etc period for entertainment value.
Hi Jeff,
I had a few thoughts about the golf course and golf tournament. This is a good place for them.
1. I watched a lot of coverage this weekend, trying to get a feel for the individual holes. Even by Sunday evening, I found Whistling Straits lacking in memorability. At most great golf courses, each hole has a distinctive look from the tee. If you showed me a picture looking down the 2
nd, 4
th and 15
th holes from the tee box, I don’t think I could tell them apart. Also, the four par 3s, though reasonably different from a playing perspective, look very similar.
2. The thousand bunkers look strange, but I argue they serve an important purpose for tournament play. Having such a complex puzzle of sand and grass yields all sorts of odd shots and predicaments for these great players. They have to be creative, and they have a great variety of risk/reward plays from the rough. Compared to other American major golf tournaments, Whistling Straits yielded a greater variety of recovery plays.
3. In my opinion, years from now Whistling Straits may be remembered as an example of massive excess, a hideously complex design that is way too hard to maintain. I went into the tournament baffled that the course is considered a top 5 modern design by Golfweek magazine, and after four days of looking closely, I still don’t see how such an ornate, severe, manufactured landscape deserves that type of respect. I don’t get it.
4. But it played well for the pros. There’s value in setting up the course a bit softer, so we can see how great these golfers can be. Chambers Bay yielded higher scores with ultra firm fairways and inconsistent greens. I thought Whistling Straits was the superior venue for watching pro golf. In many ways they are similar.
5. During this tournament, I was less concerned about the massive distances the ball traveled, and more interested in how straight the ball flies. The ball going so far and so straight is of some concern moving forward.
6. Whistling Straits has weird sand. It appears to have very small particles, and looks sort of like dust. It seemed to yield mostly “chunk and run” type results, and few of the spinning sand shots we’ve become accustomed to.