This course was once among my absolute favorites in spite of being terribly conditioned. Now the conditioning is better than as good as it gets for the amount of play. I do have some issues with the maintenance meld. Fescue above bunker lips, overall depth of rough, and standard width of fairways, and firm bunker bottoms with deep ball plugging soft faces. On 16 it is better to be in the right fescue than literally 1 inch into the regualr rough. These are not the issues that have lead to its decline. It is the blatent Reesification of a Tilly masterpiece.
The latest destruction involves holes 3, 9, 11, and 13. And before this there was the addition of a hideous left greenside bunker on 8, and the absolutley terrible green expansion to a depth of 47 yards of 14 with a Rees style bunker on the left.
This is the new back tee on 3 makes the hole play about 230 from the middle. This is a 39 yard deep green that kind of evokes a redan look. This is not a redan, and balls hitting fairly deep into the green will long bounce over into brutal rough.
This is the 9th which was once a kind of breather hole, but always was a tough birdie with the front pins because the flatness of the green tended to make shots take a long first bounce. This was when the hole played at 416, but offered a 270 yard carry tee ball to significantly cut the dogleg. The hole is now offically 460, however, the measurement is not down the middle but along the left side of the fairway. My laser measurement came out between 475 and 490--it was not very precise due to the contour of the fairway making it difficult to find the exact middle.
Does this bunker look like something that Tilly would have built? What was wrong with the natural hillside contour?
For those who were not too high on the pinched bottleneck bunker look that Rees created on the 18th, there is now a goundlevel version on the 11th. The left bunker was extended out to the faiway and a new bunker on the right ( there could have been a bunker far out to the right that was hidden by fescue the past 20 years) pinches the fairway to about 22-24 yards in width.
Again, do these look Tilly or do they look Rees?
This is the new 13th that no longer has much of a dogleg. In the pre-Rees days, it was a very scary tee shot from the 576 tee (which was mysteriously shortened on the card to 556 for the 2002 Open and afterwards) because balls hit slightly left could bounce hard down the falloff and into light fescue and maybe even the woods.
Though the rough has negated this possibility since 1998, the player usually saw the natural slope and was aware of this on the tee shot. And now the most unnatural bunker Bethpage has among all the courses.
As you can observe, this is a deep fairway bunker.
And how built up and unnatural is this look?
