I'm blushing at the above. I hope this isn't a case where the title of the thread is anti-matter and my posting under it will cause the whole Universe to vaporize. If so ... sorry in advance!
I don't know exactly where I said what Adam referred to (play it wrong, blame the architect), but I learned that from Pete Dye at the height of his controversial period. The particular example was a situation at the TPC of Connecticut (now largely changed) where on the last hole, Pete and Commissioner Beman had to decide where to place a cart path. Either they had to put it so far away from the fairway that it would be hell for the members to access it, or they had to put it somewhere that a long-hitting pro might hit the cart path and bounce into trouble. Pete was the one who decided to place it for the members' convenience.
Right after Beman left, Pete said to me that he would be sure to get some grief over that path at the tournament. He said if it was him playing for a $250,000, he would treat that path like a hazard and make sure he didn't get to it from the tee, but he was sure that the pros would just fire away with a driver and blame him over the location of the path. And that's precisely what they did!
I've stayed away from the infinitely long and boring "Fair or Unfair" thread but something posted there reminds me of another Pete Dye story. I happened to be with him at the TPC in 1982, when he went back to the locker room to change after being thrown in the lake by Jerry Pate. The only two players still around were Tom Weiskopf and Ed Sneed, who knew Pete from The Golf Club, and each of them was waiting to tell Pete their pet peeve about the design. I'll never forget Ed Sneed's:
Ed was playing the last day with Hale Irwin, who hit every club exactly the same distance as Ed. They both hit 5-irons at the 13th, trying to catch the slope in the middle of the green to feed back down to the hole at the front left. Ed said his ball and Hale's hit no more than four feet apart on that green, but one of them caught the slope and went back to three feet, and the other missed it and bounced to the back of the green leaving an impossible sixty-foot putt. Ed said he thought that was unfair, because even at his level a player couldn't be expected to hit the ball within a four-foot radius.
Pete replied immediately. He said both of them could have been aiming straight at the pin and had a larger margin of error, but they were chicken of the water hazard in front and so they chose to aim at a little patch of slope they weren't good enough to hit. Then, on the way out, he remembered to ask Ed how the hole had turned out ... and it turned out that both men had two-putted for par anyway !!!