Are grass eyebrows an effective hazard?

[Tom Bacsanyi]

^^^^^Anything is easier to maintain than a bunker. No really, I'm not joking.


That being said, berms/blobs/what have you would never be maintenance free.

[JohnVDB]

Looking at the wart in the picture above, I think of the much larger mound in the middle of the 15th fairway at Royal Dornoch.  As for the eyebrows, the set of them coming from the right on the 14th (Foxy) are classic. Both work very well. Foxy’s are out of range for the shorter hitters drives, but come into play on their second shots.

[Jeff_Brauer]

^^^^^Anything is easier to maintain than a bunker. No really, I'm not joking.


That being said, berms/blobs/what have you would never be maintenance free.

I use many grass bunkers, basically shaped like bunkers, but without sand.  When I first started golfing in the 1970's, the Chicago public courses I played had many former grass bunkers, now grass, and I guess I grew up believing those were natural parts of a golf course.


I cringe when I see scalp marks on them, as I did this weekend at one of my courses up in Kansas.  Whenever I measure those scalp areas, they exceed the long recommended machine mowing maximum steepness of 33%.  Some measure must 36%, maybe 40%, a result of some aggressive shaping or poorly drawn plans, i.e., if a grading plan shows a slope at steeper than 33% through careless drafting (or design) they end up scalping. 


Some things can be avoided with a proper plan.  It is hard to show a subtle transition slope at the crest, and those areas are the ones that tend to scalp, in addition to the overly steep slopes.  In the field, we generally believe that if construction tractors and machines can get over it, mowers will eventually get over the slope, too, but some times we "missed it by that much." (Insert Maxwell Smart voice here)


Yes, they say mowers are better than ever, but probably, any course that can't afford too many sand bunkers probably can't afford the more expensive mowers that cover steep banks.  And few public courses like that shaggy look, especially when it causes lost balls and ball searches, which slow play.


Which is somewhat a shame.  I have always found that the steep banks provide artistic shadows and contrast.  Also, the steeper the bank, the lower the overall feature has to be to still be noticeable as a hazard feature.

[Mike Nuzzo]

Some views of the eyebrow* on the 10th at Memorial as Tom described earlier.
It is taller than me.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CFLI84sFzq7/


*if someone names a feature for the sake of discussion one doesn't get to redefine Jeff's definition.
Jeff was describing the shape and form of an eyebrow, not the furry part above your eye.
I think I called it a clam shell in the video description for The Houston Open.

It might seem as a useful hazard 300-325+ off the back tee, where the amount of players who get in it would be low, and they would more often than not, trap a good player against the bank, perhaps raising their stroke count on at least that hole.

We built a feature kind of like that on the tenth hole at Memorial Park, early on in the project while we were searching for a style, but we didn't emulate it on other holes.  [It's not a mound so much as an abrupt rise to a higher level of fairway.]  It's about 300 yards off the tee, so some of the guys are just going to fly it and not worry, but if a long hitter doesn't take it on, they might wind up in the bunker on the opposite side further down.


As a hazard, it's only moderately effective, because if you wind up more than say 6-8 yards behind it, it's not really much of a problem.  That's a pretty narrow band of punishment and it's impossible to have a tee where that will affect a large % of players.

[Buck Wolter]

The ones on #5 at Lawsonia are very effective -- two of the worst lies I can recall on the two on the left side of our afternoon round. I'd have rather been in almost any fairway bunker, almost had to take an unplayable on the first one about a foot below the top of a Rooneyesque brow.