Sam,
It has been about thirty years since I played Riviera. I recall going for the green once and then playing a lay up shot on another visit. Don’t recall the layup being a problem.
Curious what may have changed since circa 1990.
Tim--
Frankly, very little has changed about the actual hole itself from a "design" perspective. The mowing patterns have changed some and the runoff area to the left of the front section of the green has been expanded some (there was a time rough came nearly all the way up to the edge), but by and large the bones of the hole pretty much remain in the same state as I found them when I first played the golf course in 1997. The tee has been slightly reconfigured, but that change really makes more of a difference for member play than it does for professional play. The rough has been grown out some in my favorite area to hit it by the cart path on the left between 10 and 11, but rare is the professional who ends up in that location.
This is a small thing, but they have shaved down the left edge of the fringe up against the left greenside bunker and so any shot that used to have a 50/50 chance of staying up is now a sure thing to trickle into that bunker. This makes more of a difference than it might appear as often times the laid up wedge shot from the fairway is tugged slightly for safety to the left half. So long as you didn't have any right to left spin on the ball, a straight wedge shot that landed a few paces left of the back hole locations would actually stay up top. That shot now nearly always ends up in the left bunker.
The biggest changes to the hole have come to the golfers who play it and the equipment that they use to do so. While I do agree green speeds are a piece of the equation, the greens were still reasonably fast ten years ago and we rarely heard much of a cry about the need to change the hole. This is conjecture on my part, but I do think that the inability to spin the ball around the greens quite as much as you used to before the groove changes (and a decade or two before that with higher-spin golf balls) has increased the frequency of the blow ups around the green where guys are going back and forth from one bunker to the next.
I know this will sound like the words of a cranky old man (which I shouldn't be at 36), but I do think that professional golfers are a little softer than they used to be. The hole is less than 300 yards and often plays under par. It is by no means a herculean feat to play the hole at even par or better over the course of the tournament. There seems to be some belief on the part of some professionals that simply because the hole is 300 yards that it must be a great birdie opportunity and is not permitted to be a challenging par. A drive long left of the green into the rough, a chip "laid up" onto the front half of the green and two putts is not that much to expect from a PGA TOUR professional irrespective of the day's hole location.
The trouble comes at ten when players try for just a little more and find a five or worse trying to seek out the three or better. It calls to mind when Gary Player had a conversation with Bobby Jones about the third hole over dinner at Augusta National. Player asked Jones how the heck is he supposed to birdie the third when the hole is located in the front left.
Jones responded "when the hole is located on the front left, you're not supposed to birdie the third hole."