Rub of the green I guess
Mark, you're complaining about people using the word "fair" while now for at least the second time, IIRC, mis-using this phrase. Rub of the green does not mean "bad luck." It's defined in the Rules of Golf (through the end of the year, at least).
To matters at hand, you seem to be hung up on the idea of luck - smoothing out fairways, drives ending up in divot holes, getting bunkers to the same consistency… when few others are really talking about it much. Most here that I have seen are talking about luck as something that happens, good and bad, and so long as it's not excessive… it's fine. Nobody here has talked about bunkers needing to be consistent. Nobody here has talked about fairway contouring needing to be flattened. Or drives not ending up in divot holes. Nobody here has… well, except you, I guess.
I understand you're hearing that from greens committees and other things, but you're not really getting much of that stuff from us. So why keep posting about it? Just going off on a rant? Okay, I can appreciate a good rant. But I'm not seeing many people here argue that a ball going in a divot hole or a course with slightly different bunker textures is "unfair." I think you're under-estimating the intelligence of your audience, or talking down to it perhaps. At the very least, people can appreciate that the result of a single shot being "unfair" (if we want to use that word) because of "bad luck" doesn't make the entire course or even the the challenges that normally face that particular shot on that particular hole unfair.
In other words, I've never seen or heard a golfer hit a sprinkler head and have his ball bounce over the green say "man, this course is so unfair." They will say "man, that was a bad break." I think that most people - and certainly the audience here - can separate a normal or reasonable amount of lucky (and unlucky) outcomes from the way the course or any shot on the course plays the vast majority of the time.
I hit the ball above the 11th hole at Lake View CC here near my home the other day. That green is about a 5-6% slope (or more) over most of the surface. I knew it, and I hit a bad shot to get there. I paid the price with a three-putt (though I almost made the 15-footer back up the hill), but that wasn't luck, either - the hole is "fair" IMO because you just can't get above the hole location there.
While I agree that skill is the essential component to golf, its not the only thing...luck still plays fairly sizeable role. And they all admit they need some good breaks/lucky bounces to win.
I disagree that luck has a "fairly sizable role."
Tiger didn't win every week for the same reason baseball teams don't go 162-0, even if they're playing in a weak division, and football teams rarely even go 16-0. 72 holes is a small sample size (just as nine innings are, and four quarters), and player performances fluctuate a little. Over the long haul, Tiger Woods wins his fair share of events, but he can't perform at the same level every week. He's not a machine. He's as close as we've seen, perhaps, but he's not. It's far, far, far more about actual performance than "luck." Over the long haul, the Yankees win their fair share of games. Over the long haul, the Browns lose a lot of their games, even if they can occasionally beat the Patriots.