I had an interesting conversation with Larry Nelson at the Tour Championship this year at East Lake. We got to talking about Oakmont and his win there. He said the fairways were so narrow and the rough so penal that on the first couple of tees on Thursday he freaked out and could barely swing. He recalled that he started the tournament bogey, double bogey or something like that.
So he decided to take a different approach to the tight fairways. He closed his eyes on his tee shots. He aligned himself as to where he wanted to go, closed his eyes and swung. He said he didn't look at bunkers, rough, hills, nothing - he just closed his eyes and swung. That was the only way he could deal with the narrowness of the playing corridors. He played the entire tournament by not looking at the course from the tee.
That such an approach could be successful suggests, among other things, that penal set ups are, in essence, tests of a player's ability to hit it straight. And that is what Nelson figured out. You don't need to understand the architecture. Heck, you don't even need to look at it. You just have to hit it straight down the irrigation pipe.
Nelson agreed. He said that because of the penal set-up, he felt like the great architectural features at Oakmont were largely irrelevant to him. He ignored those features, focused exclusively on repeating his own swing - to the point of closing his eyes - and he won the damn thing.
That is at the heart of why I think USGA set ups tend to result in dull golf and dull tournaments. Or, conversely, train wrecks, like last year's Open at WF. (Try watching a replay of the '06 US Open. It is painful. The theme is great golfers being beaten up. It is not great golfers displaying their skills.)
Penal set ups tend to reduce courses, even great courses, to platforms for testing a certain kind of golfing skill, a skill that could be tested more accurately with white lines on a driving range. In fact, if we are to believe Larry Nelson, the best way to play such courses is to ignore their design features altogether and pretend you ARE at the driving range.
Bob