A Waffle House waitress is more native to the South than a Jagged edged bunker..

[Mike_Young]

These things don't work in the south or I should say in the Georgia clay....played another today and one just wonders how long it will be until some of these things are changed to functional bunkers.....as a matter of fact I don't think bunkers were ever natural except in sandy sites.....now this isn't to say I don't like "blow outs" etc....I do but those occur in sand....when they are done somewhere else they are just temporary....It certainly can't be called minimalism here because they are contrived....JMO  

[Chris Cupit]

Mike,

What would you say looked more "contrived"--MacKenzie's original bunkering at ANGC or the perfectly manufactured and more rounded bunkers of today?

[paul cowley]

Mike ....at certain sites I guess I prefer a more natural look, even in the clay, versus the manicured edges ala Augusta or lesser wannabees.

If done right I don't think the construction or maintenance costs are that much different between the two styles....whatever the hell they are .

[Tiger_Bernhardt]

Mike  Those are true words, as is the waffle house wattress observation.

[Geoffrey Childs]

I've never seen a jagged edged bunker that can hold a candle to a Southern waitress holding my waffles, cheese grits and a cup of coffee in the morning.  This Yankee agrees with you Mike!

[John_Cullum]

The good doctor eats grits, at WH no less. there is definitely hope for this man.

[JESII]

Let me tell you something Mike, that title line of yours is probably the most redundant statement I've ever heard.

You could have gotten away with "A Waffle House waitress is more native to the South than a can of Budweiser in the parking lot at Daytona"...

[JMorgan]

Once in a while, chicken and dumplings in sausage gravy at Cracker Barrel does the trick, too.  

[Mike_Young]

Mike ....at certain sites I guess I prefer a more natural look, even in the clay, versus the manicured edges ala Augusta or lesser wannabees.

If done right I don't think the construction or maintenance costs are that much different between the two styles....whatever the hell they are .

Paul,

Moe deb knit lee I prefer the same....much more than the manicured look....
 I know you have seen the same thing...a plain bunker face with no contouring except that someone took a paintgun and made a jagged sand line......very two dimensional...and I don't think it will stand the test of time...JMO

[paul cowley]

....no it will just go the easiest way to take care of, and that can be almost anything at times....today I went to a course of ours where the maintenance staff with little to do decided to desod the faces of some bunker noses, taking off 3 inches of depth and then sprinkle sand back over the convex surface.

I can hardly wait for the first rain.....and the contamination and the rebuilding of the faces....but hey, they thought they were doing a neat kind of look......

[Mike_Young]

Mike,

What would you say looked more "contrived"--MacKenzie's original bunkering at ANGC or the perfectly manufactured and more rounded bunkers of today?

Chris,
I don't know.
If it weren't AGNC time would probably have dictated a bunker with a grass face and almost flat sand.....I think much of the original jagged edge was more of a necessity than a strived for look......erosion created some of it and they had no way to cut it either.....sometimes it interesting to just look at the grass around ANGC bunkers in the 60's......

[RJ_Daley]

This last Dixie Cup, we stayed at an H.I. in Charleston with a Waffle House next door.  We took feed there for the 3 mornings we stayed there.  I'd have to say that the jagged edge waitress was more native to the south than a waffle based bunker.

Mike, you post a lot of these questions about design-construction.  Like being able to tell the natural lay of the land VS shaping.  I wish you'd get into a photobucket or some such page, and download a bunch of pictures of design details you find interesting, and then post them with your questions.  I'd love to see some examples that you are thinking of for what are out of place jagged edge bunkers in the south, and some fairway into rough areas that you find artificial looking grading, and what you feel is superior work.  It might be a very instructive exercise for us other posters.

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Mike,
How ya'll doin?

Say our Waffle House Wairess, Bulah, comes over slams your plate of food down on the table and it's not the way it should look. You see, the cook decided to prepare it a different way adding another two tablespoons of lard (animal fat, usually from pigs or cows known as transfat) and in this case the guy doesn't care about the ungoing obesity crisis in the United States, but you do because it affects your golf swing and your pumper.

Do you send it back or do you attempt to organize the mess yourself? After all, you're a paying customer and you have the right to want your food look good before you devour it grits and all and ultimately it's all going to have an affect on your choice of eating institutions when you need to get your grit & chicken fetus fix.

Yes, I guess it's all about the quality of eating institutions we like to eat at: Some are going to be expensive and use quality ingredients and healthier and more natural alternatives which not only make the food better for you, but taste better too, others, your just glad they can get it out simple and quick to get the job done.

It's all a matter of choice after all Mike, only so many people can put sugar in their grits.....But who am I?

(One trip to the south and all of a sudden I'm a grit authority)

[Tommy_Naccarato]

I also want to add that if any bunker looked like and is built like the one they built at the Golf Industry Show, I would rather not golf on a diet of Sand TrapperŽ or Bunker WoolŽ But I'm sure Art Hills & Associates feel it's the best bunker they ever cooked-up.....

[TEPaul]

MikeY:

In my opinion, you definitely should win the award for the year's best thread title.

[Tiger_Bernhardt]

It seems TE Paul must have driven south more than once as oppossed to private aviation to understand and embrace the beauty of Mikes post.

[Mike_Young]

It seems TE Paul must have driven south more than once as oppossed to private aviation to understand and embrace the beauty of Mikes post.

Tiger,
I don't think so...I think he has a former WH waitress as his personal flight attendant on his private aviation....I also think she is his ghostwriter for many of his post.....

[Chris Cupit]

Tommy,

No self respecting Southron would ever put anything in their grits!  Grits are perfect, why mess with 'em?  Maybe peanuts in their Coca-Cola, but...

Mike,

I was looking at a bunch of old pictures and FWIW here is what I think looks unatural:  bright white sand, smooth bunkers edges, manicured and edged so much that the lip of the bunker is 1-2 inches high (almost a mini sod wall!)  The shape I object to is the softly rounded, smooth look that seems to be more concerned with accomodating a sand pro than anything else.  The "Mickey Mouse" eared bunkers of the 70's and 80's are just gross.

While I, too, am not sure that the angular edges that are almost geometric look great, I do really like an "unkempt", rough look to bunkers.  It looks more natural to me to have edges that have some smmoth parts and some collapsed or jagged edges as well.  To me the more you look at lines in nature the more you see all kinds of little imperfections, humps, bumps and swales.  

Of course creating it is "unnatural" in the sense one is artificially trying to re-create that look and it can be overdone but...I would argue that what doesn't look good to you may be the examples of an "over the top" attempt to create the irregularility naturally occurring in nature.  

One of the better bunkers on my course came after a big rain last summer after we had just moved a lot of dirt.  The water naturally created some cool washed out shapes--gulleys really that became the frazzled looking bunkers (nine of them) built into the side of the hill on our ninth hole.  That washed out look also became part of a 6000 square foot bunker behind my eleventh green  (the green is right at 4000 sq. ft.)!

I think nothing could look more natural than just expanding on what nature had started and trying to re-create the funky lines those rains produced.

[BCrosby]

Tommy N -

Bulah (sp?) says hello. She asked if you missed her red-eye gravy? I volunteered that you did. I assume there was some sub-text to her question (you old fox), but I didn't have the guts to get into it with her.

Mike -

I don't think jagged edged bunkers is the issue. I don't know whether they will survive or not in the SE. We'll see. (The survival of the jagged edge MacK bunker on the 10th at ANGC doesn't count because there aren't many courses with a $15MM maintenance budget.)

The issue is that the future of bunkers in the SE (and maybe elsewhere) is that they be built to look more like the land on which the the course is built. Bright white sand is not indigenous to many places.

I would think that there are a large number of ways to attack that issue. Each architect will have his own preferred solution. I just hope that more and more architects take it on.

In the SE, for example, you don't see naturally exposed sand. You do see clay washouts, ravines and roadbeds. My hope is that more regional architects make use of those sorts of things. I think that is the more important long term issue.

Your skepticism about about jagged edges may make sense. I don't know. But I hope it doesn't get in the way of looking at different ways of approaching bunkers in the SE.

Bob

[Bill_McBride]

Tommy N -

Bulah (sp?) says hello. She asked if you missed her red-eye gravy? I volunteered that you did. I assume there was some sub-text to her question, but I didn't have the guts to get into it with her.

Mike -

I don't think jagged edged bunkers is the issue. I don't know whether they will survive or not in the SE. We'll see. (The survival of the jagged edge MacK bunker on the 10th at ANGC doesn't count because there aren't many courses with a $15MM maintenance budget.)

The issue is that the future of bunkers in the SE (and maybe elsewhere) is that they be built to look more like the land on which the the course is built. Bright white sand is not indigenous to many places.

I would think that there are a large number of ways to attack that issue. Each architect will have his own preferred solution. I just hope that more and more architects take it on.

In the SE, for example, you don't see naturally exposed sand. You do see clay washouts, ravines and roadbeds. My hope is that more regional architects make us of those sorts of things. I think that is the more important long term issue.

Your skepticism about about jagged edges may make sense. I don't know. But I hope it doesn't get in the way of looking at different ways of approaching bunkers in the SE.

Bob

Jeez, Bob, just thinking about red-eye gravy like my dad used to make whets my appetite on a Sunday morning!  How many of these durn yankees who talk about grits know anything about red-eye gravy?

Cuscowilla has those red clay bunkers but Mike doesn't like those either!  He's hard to please...  

[Peter Pallotta]

"In the SE, for example, you don't see naturally exposed sand. You do see clay washouts, ravines and roadbeds. My hope is that more regional architects make us of those sorts of things. I think that is the more important long term issue."

Bob
I'm assuming that there'd be parallels to this in various other regions, i.e. they have features that are more naturally-occuring than exposed sand. Do you have a sense of why the use of these regional differences never took that much of a hold? In other words, why the bright-white sand approach seemed to become the common one. I can't believe it was simply 'marketplace' forces.

Thanks
Peter  

[BCrosby]

Peter -

I don't know why bright white sand became the default bunker sand. It's not in the UK.

I've never run across anything in the literature that even discussed the issue.

My wild a#* guess is that everyone in the US always thought bunker sand was supposed to be bright white. And if your sand wasn't, it was a sign that the club couldn't afford to do it right.

But I don't know.

Bob

[Peter Pallotta]

Bob,
It's not just the common use of the bright-wide sand that puzzles me.  I also wonder why, to use the SE example, the use of naturally-occuring clay washouts never took hold there INSTEAD of sand bunkers (of any colour). Maybe this answer is as 'undocumented' as the other one; but it does seem important to me in terms of what might become acceptable alternative approaches in the future, given that those alternatives would likely be less expensive.
Peter      

[Mike_Young]

Chris C,
I agree with almost everything in your post.....no where have I said I don't like "jagged edge" or natural bunkers.  What I am trying to say is more in line with bob C.....in my words "there is no natural bunker in  a clay base"......that is not to say they don't look natural.....it is to say they will cost more to remain "natural" and at some point in the life of the course they will revert to the path of least resistance....IMO....
as Chirs C says..some of the best most natural looking bunkers are those where the rain washed out or eroded the edges but that same rain will also wash all of the sand out of the same bunker......I think many of the dead guys ended up with this effect because many of their courses grew in for several years before they were ready for play and these erosions were probably common....a few years ago most supts would have been instructed to fix these areas.....
For me it is not a question of liking these areas..it is a concern as to how they will hold up over time.....
Bill says I don't like the bunkers at cusco..not so....I like the golf course, the strategy, the greens complexes and the routing as well as the bunkers...and I think the supt there is one of the best at maintaining a course the way I would like to see one maintained but I think that it would be fair to say he spends much more to maintain the natural look than he would the maintained look...maybe not....don't know....but they are not natural to the area.....doesn't mean i don't like them....so many of the bunkers in the South have liners....nothing natural there.....JMO

[Tommy_Naccarato]

Bob,
Bulah (sp) really rocked my world. Haven't meant anyone close to her since.

I'll stick up for Mike here and attest he loves Cusco. He is a man of principle which is more then I can say for myself. However, I would like to see Mike answer my post in regards to the title of this thread. Mike, did it make sense, or am I going to have to come back there soon and show  Chris that you do put sugar in your grits.

So much for him being a self-respecting Southerner........