Rough as a design feature

[Joe Hancock]

A couple more thoughts:


Deep rough is to a Tour player what bumper bowling is to a child. While not guaranteeing a great result, it does prevent an awful one.


Fairways are more expensive to maintain than rough because humans chose to make it so. Mowing heights have become ridiculously low, green is the only acceptable color of “healthy” grass, and each and every lie has to be “perfect”.

[Kalen Braley]

I'm still chewing on the original post with Ben's comments.


I recall seeing an awful lot of shots from the rough where players had to negotiate tree limbs and bad angles into the greens, even if they weren't directly "in the trees".  So for these guys... isn't it more difficult to have to deal with the rough combined with a tree limb or two...as opposed to just dealing with limbs?  Or is it a dealing with trees and hitting off pine straw as well if you're unlucky to get in it?

[JMEvensky]

Fairways are more expensive to maintain than rough because humans chose to make it so. Mowing heights have become ridiculously low, green is the only acceptable color of “healthy” grass, and each and every lie has to be “perfect”.

Once had a member stand up at an annual meeting and ask why the maintenance staff couldn't fill in divots in the rough. I thought it was a good joke until I realized he was serious.

[Jon Wiggett]

Is cutting rough lower really an economic decision?


I can understand that it will be on wild, steep terrain but just off the fairway, the kind of place where it’s usually cut say 2” higher than the fairway?


If your already mowing a nicely grassed, manicured even, area say twice per week with the blades set ‘high’, does it cost more to mow the same area twice per week with the blades set ‘low’?


Atb

Thomas,


the lower you cut the more frequently you need to. Cut at 5mm or less and you are looking at mowing daily in the main season. 15mm every second day. 20mm maybe three times a week. 25mm then twice times a week. 50mm maybe just once or possibly still twice  a week.


The lower the cut the more expensive it is.




Jon

[Thomas Dai]

Jon,
Thanks for this.
The kind of analysis I was hoping for.
Atb

[Adam Clayman]

If the best reason to grow the 2nd cut at ANGC is to give the player a little more to think about on his next shot,  it has significantly less importance (on a core principle basis) on how the course plays, and everything to do with how he/she plays it. To Ben's point, balls should roll out to their intended, or unintended, fruition without too much manicured intervention. Especially from some arbitrary mow line. 


The old look of nearly wall to wall fairway made the Masters special. Watching this year I couldn't help but recognize the courses look as rote.

[Gib_Papazian]

The obvious answer is wall-to-wall fairway, maintained on a water-starved diet at around 80%. Rough over 1.5 inches effectively cripples a large percentage of the players - not because it takes the spin off the ball, but because they cannot advance it more than 150 yards. Obviously, turf variety plays into this, but I cannot see where rough (as a design concept) has any validity. It is really holdover from the R.T.Jones ethos - and seems at odds with encouraging the ground game.


The Lake Course at Olympic is vasty more interesting - and in many ways more difficult - when the rough lines are cut way back. There are just more options, both around the green and on approach shots. Neal ended up (I did the first pass) consulting at a club in Coachella and the difference, just the act of cutting the grass in front of - and around - the bunkers made an unbelievable difference. That took exactly two days to accomplish.


In America, we would be better served to emulate the game across the pond and let nature dictate things. We seem to have this philosophy of trying to control every aspect of what is essentially a bunch of shaped dirt, covered with grass. Just mow, wall-to-wall, as often as the budget will allow, live with brown when it makes sense and quit this insane arms race of acting like the Stimp Meter is for measuring the length of a club's penis.


 

[Jerry Kluger]

Your points are all well taken but my original point was that by growing rough Crenshaw felt that ANGC was easier for the pros because it held up balls that were headed for the trees.  So it would seem to me that by doing so it becomes a design feature beyond just the obvious difficulty of hitting from the rough versus hitting from the fairway, at least with respect to the very best players.  It thus becomes a design feature to be considered by those in charge at the Masters so is it considered as well as a design feature when architects are designing a course of any type.