Double penalties

[Charlie Goerges]

Bel Meadows, a course near Clarksburg WV was a Trent Jones design which fell upon hard times that maintenance was at a minimum.  So minimum in fact that trees actually grew in a bunker or two.

One odd thing I noticed about High Pointe when we started rebuilding it was that there were little pine trees growing in almost every old bunker out there. All I could figure is that they held water a little better and gave the tree more chance to get started.

Pines also just grow well in sand and there would have been less competition starting out there.

[Sam Morrow]

This is something Von Hagge and Devlin seemed to enjoy doing. Can't tell you how many times I drove it in a fairway bunker and had to factor a tree into my recovery. I hated it, still hate it but I grew to appreciate it because it made me think more about the tee shot and where I really needed to play it.

[Kalen Braley]

Not to takeaway from this scenario but i think others are more common and just as brutal.

Like flying a green and being left with a recovery shot from deep rough, on a severe downhill lie, to a green running away from you.  I've certainly encountered this far more often with similar effect on the scorecard vs the bunker/tree combo

[Rob Marshall]

Not to takeaway from this scenario but i think others are more common and just as brutal.

Like flying a green and being left with a recovery shot from deep rough, on a severe downhill lie, to a green running away from you.  I've certainly encountered this far more often with similar effect on the scorecard vs the bunker/tree combo

We used to have a few greens that if you went long you went  10 yards down a hill and under and into the roots of pine trees. That was fun.

[Charlie Goerges]

I feel like double penalties or double hazards or (as I like to call them) double-whammies are pretty common. I'm ok with their use as long as they are pretty well-thought-out by the architect. That said, lots of them are not well-thought-out.

[Jeff_Brauer]

My first thought on this was it should be okay on the outside of a fw bunker, following the Ross dictum of more penalty the further you hit it off line.  That said, I would be most double penalties were not a result of the architect striving for that, but rather that trees grow and no one accounts for that in placing the near fw bunkers.  Or, some green committee planted the tree as part of their program, and it probably wasn't a hazard when new.  (Cue the old Sam Snead joke...."Son, when I was your age, I could clear that tree.  Of course, it was just a sapling then."