As most of you know, I don't often start theoretical topics here, because I don't like to be tied down to anything when I am out building a golf course.
But I promised last week I might post this, and I have officially tired from discussing rankings, so, here it is: my theory of bunkering.
Years ago, when the Slope System for course rating was just being introduced, Pete Dye had me spend a day with the main statistician behind it, Dean Knuth, to see if he had learned something from the data that should alter how we design golf holes.
Mostly, it’s a gross oversimplification. In fact, strategic design seemed to be mostly omitted from the numbers, as if people’s misses were entirely at random, instead of in predictable patterns. The difficulty rating for green side bunkering, for example, references what percentage of the green is surrounded by bunkers — but it doesn’t matter what side they are on! And the difficulty rating for fairway bunkers is all based on how many bunkers are in play 250 yards or 200 yards off the given tee — other distances are ignored.
Last year, when we started working on the design for Memorial Park, at the suggestion of a couple of other GCA posters, I dug into Mark Broadie’s book, which outlines how the pros attack a course. Those concepts were mostly reinforced by my conversations with Brooks Koepka, and with Butch and Claude Harmon. Tour pros decide their aim points based on water hazards, boundaries, or obstacles [trees] that would cost them a shot if they get tangled up. Today's perfectly groomed bunkers [unless of the revetted variety] just don’t rise to that level of hazard. If Brooks is in the sand 150 yards from the green, it’s better than being in the rough; if he’s in a bunker by the green, he’s “trying to hole it.” That was the rationale for not building many bunkers at Memorial Park.
However, if you extend Mark Broadie’s logic to the average golfer, bunkers for them are a real menace, and strategic bunker positioning should have a huge impact on the lines of play — more and more so for the bad bunker player. Women golfers seem to understand this — they aim away from bunkers like the plague. But most men do not give bunkers near enough leeway, and pay the price.
Of course, if you surround the green with bunkers - or just put one to either side - then for the “C” player who struggles with bunker play, you are only offering two options: either aim to the center of the green, or lay up short of the bunkers. A course which kept presenting those two choices would get boring pretty quickly.
All of this dovetails nicely with my own lifelong preference in bunkering, which is to *almost* always try to make the bunkers next to a green look imbalanced and asymmetrical.
There are three reasons for this approach:
1. Asymmetrical positioning looks more natural. [Nature is not formal: that’s why I hate the Biarritz hole.]
2. As Mr. Dye taught me, even the professionals tend to hedge toward safety when they see it, and the only thing you can really do to make the approach shot harder for them is to try and get them to aim away from the hole. So the question is whether they really do not think about the bunkers at all. If they think about them even a tiny bit, then a bunker hard up against one side of the green will get them aiming to the other side.
3. For the average player, I am always giving them a safer side to bail out to, if they are not up to the challenge. Occasionally, that bailout might be “long”, but I would guess that I’ve only built one or two holes per course [if not less] that really gave you no miss but to lay up. This also tends to deliver a very low Slope Rating to my courses, not that I really care. Opting out of taking on the trouble is not going to produce a very low score, but I'm okay if it's easier for the average guy to break 100.
As to fairway bunkering, following the same logic, it’s pretty rare for me to bunker both sides of a fairway. I will do it occasionally, just for variety, or where the landforms are compelling, or because I’m trying to make you hit away from something.
When we did pinch the landing area on the 9th hole at Sebonack, left and right, I was startled to find out that Jack Nicklaus objected quite strongly to that. He said he NEVER pinches a fairway like that; instead, he will stagger bunkers up the fairway - left at 220 yards, right at 265, left at 300 - to make the player choose a side. [I did not ask him, but there was a quote from Jack a long time ago how he used to play exhibitions on new RTJ courses back in the 1960’s and how much he hated the un-strategic bunkering in the landing areas - I’m guessing he vowed never to do that.]
I admire Jack’s idea, in theory, but any theory does start to become repetitive after a while, and more importantly, the landforms do not often set up at the perfect distances for you to follow his approach. I tend to place fairway bunkers where the landforms suggest them, and design the rest of the hole around that. [Of course, I have set myself up for that by routing a hole seeing where the potential bunkers might be.]
I do love seeing cross bunkers and interrupted fairways, on older courses, but it is very hard to incorporate them into modern designs because they inevitably don’t work well for one tee or another. I know that Gil Hanse likes to build a “great hazard” into his courses, so apparently I did not do a good enough job of drilling into him what Alice Dye drilled into me about how debilitating such features can be for women golfers. [If you have never had to chip up to the edge of a hazard so you could try to carry it with your next shot, you’re in no position to @ me.] I get a lot of compliments from women golfers about our work, and most of the credit for that should go to Pete and Alice [and to my mom, who was one of those players Alice was concerned about].
So, those are my tendencies in bunkering. If I had an intern handy, I’d have him sketch out a few of my holes as illustrations, but if you look at Google Earth you will see how rarely Pacific Dunes has fairway bunkers on both sides of holes, or bunkers even 1/4 of the way around the greens. As George Thomas observed, even if the bunker is shallow and not much penalty for those in it, it poses a significant challenge to all the players who miss wide of it and have to pitch over it to the green, so I tend to be sparing with my greenside bunkers.
I have realized over the years this is why a lot of people think my par-3 holes are not up to snuff — because a lot of famous par-3 holes are virtually surrounded by trouble, and mine nearly always give you an out. [Even the 7th at Barnbougle.] And I have started bunkering my par-3’s more tightly, since it’s easier to rationalize that you have more control over where various golfers are approaching from. But there are still lots of golfers who can’t fly the ball 140 yards to a target and make it stop, and they tend to be the same people who really struggle out of bunkers, so, I’ll take the heat for giving them a way to play the hole.
Please note that these are my strong tendencies, not absolute rules of design. I make exceptions wherever I see fit, and my associates sometimes get a bit carried away when I’m gone [especially the younger ones]. But the rationale behind my approach is pretty strong, and I feel that it’s one of the things that sets my work apart, that no one has ever pointed out in print.
Just for fun, I looked at the three courses at Streamsong, to see if we were all different in our approach to green side bunkering. I was surprised to find that the Red course was pretty similar to the Blue - Bill does tend to put bunkers front-and-center more than I do, but most of his greens have an open side, as I described. The Black course, also, has a lot of short grass around the greens, which are already ginormous because some of what was planned as chipping area is mowed at green height. So I guess, in that sense at least, we are all minimalists at heart, and don’t feel like it is always necessary to introduce a bunker to make the hole interesting.