Affect of Bunker maitenance on scoring...

[Mike_Young]

IMHO the bunker has become an overbearing design element in the modern course mainly due to the aesthetics of the contrast between sand and grass..the movement and shape of bunkers has defined talent in design more than routing or green complexes. The industry has taken advantage and invented all types of maintenance schemes to generate more revenue from clubs and courses because of the modern bunker. ( linings, sands, rakings, irrigation of sand)
BUT IMHO it has weakened the strategy of the game and courses as much as length has. The bunker no longer does what the bunker was meant to do.  When a bunker is not maintained the good player will play to the inside of the pin and will fear the shortside. If not he views the bunker as a bailout. 

Would less maintenance be considered a reflection of a supt's abilities?
Could the pros break par if they knew the bunkers were not maintained in a uniform condition at LACC next week?

[John Kavanaugh]

Millennials are solving this issue with their “raking” techniques.

[Ben Hollerbach]

Millennials are solving this issue with their “raking” techniques.

Bad rake jobs are age agnostic.

[JohnVDB]

Yesterday I was the referee with one of the final matches of the Palmer Cup at Laurel Valley. The match was between Austin Greaser and Josele Ballester. In the second hole both players drove into fairway bunkers.  They both got very good lies with no issues from lips.  Both hit very poor shots, with Ballester hitting into the pond fronting the green and Greaser coming up short and left. Ballester then holed his fourth shot from 80 yards while Greaser failed to get up and down from the rough by the green resulting in a surprising turn of events. I think the bunkers were more of a difficulty to the players, even with perfect lies, than rough would have been.


On the par 5 18th, with Greaser 1 up both players again hit into bunkers off the tee. Ballester got a good lie again, but Greaser got one of the worst plugged lies under the face I’ve seen. You could barely see the ball.. He was only able to get the ball out of the bunker, moving it about 10 feet into the rough. He was still away, forced to play a risky third over the lake into a brisk wind from the rough, he hit his third shot into the lake fronting the green.


Ballester was able to lay up to a much shorter distance in the fairway and hit his third to the green whereupon Greaser conceded the hole and the match was tied.


The inconsistency of the bunkers led to all the excitement being taken out of the final.


As shown on #2, bunkers still offer challenges even when you get perfect lies, there is no need to end up with basically unplayable lies. I believe even Bobby Jones agreed with that concept in some comments about the rakes used at Oakmont back in the ‘20s. He felt that really difficult lies take away the skill of the better player.


The bunkering at Laurel Valley is the main visual feature on the course. They define the holes and cause players to have to make decisions of what they can carry or what they can reach through the doglegs and how to play around them when they can’t carry them.  Of course as far as players hit the ball today, many of them are irrelevant to the modern college level player.  Even the women were carrying bunkers that should have been more of a challenge. Still they are intimidating to look at.

[Thomas Dai]

Nicely raised Mike.
The rise of bunkering for essentially visual and photographic purposes.
This is part of the area I was attempting to raise a discussion in relation to when I initiated the thread about bunkers and ponds but perhaps my phrasing was a bit too obtuse with the reader eye being distracted by the water rather than by the relationship player course management, maintenance etc. Oh well. https://www.golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,71963.0.html
Atb

[Cal Carlisle]

Would less maintenance be considered a reflection of a supt's abilities?

Abilities? I don't think so. It's more a refection of what the club wants or is willing to pay for.

[Max Prokopy]

I think making these true hazards again would be the easiest way to rein in scoring without resorting to ball rollbacks and other more invasive ideas.  Making them hazards again shouldn't require huge design overhauls, either.  Adjusting the rake furrows or other practices, which someone smarter than me can figure out, would work well. 

[Sean_A]

I dislike yet another design discussion centred around the good players games. Unless we are talking about proper championship courses the idea is stale. This is especially true as the best players in the world save par 50% of time. Additionally, a bunker compared to what? It's usually rough, which isn't an inspiring comparison. That said, I would like

Less bunkers

More earth movement features/shaping to balance the use of bunkers

Better and bolder bunker placement

Nasty bunkers

Change the rule about penalty drops from bunkers to match water. This would facilitate nasty bunkers.

Ciao

[Thomas Dai]

Change the rule about penalty drops from bunkers to match water. This would facilitate nasty bunkers.

This would a be an excellent move, one which I have also advocated before.
It would also aid the less able player and in the right circumstances reduce maintenance/costs too. And then there's rakes and the need for them.
atb

[John Kavanaugh]

Sweetens Cove has the no rake bunker culture. For it not to fail you dudes might want to consider at least knocking down your mess with a quick brush of your feet.


Reminds me of the tragic picnic scene in Mad Men. Leave it like you find it.

[Kyle Harris]

Change the rule about penalty drops from bunkers to match water. This would facilitate nasty bunkers.

This would a be an excellent move, one which I have also advocated before.
It would also aid the less able player and in the right circumstances reduce maintenance/costs too. And then there's rakes and the need for them.
atb

Don’t need to change the rule. Just put red stakes around it and call it a penalty area.


Which is ridiculous. Like serious non-starter territory. The last thing golf needs is MORE opportunity to place your hands on the ball.


They’re bunkers. If they were supposed to be water they’d be ponds. If the desire was for the bunker to always extract one-shot penalty then the rule would already exist.


Neither are the case for good reason. This argument is no different than the equally ridiculous divot relief thing. It’s just a different cause/area of inconvenience for a different subset.


It’s a necessary shot to learn. I, for one, am drawing the line in the sand at empathy for the lesser player here.


The data also seem to support the idea that bunkers do just fine in altering the scoring landscape as they need to - in that they offer temptation for recovery.

[Kyle Harris]

“The question of bunkers is a big one and the very best school for study we have
found is along the seacoast among the dunes. Here one may study the different
formations and obtain many ideas for bunkers. We have tried to make them
natural and fit them into the landscape. The criticism had been made that we have
made them too easy, that the banks are too sloping and that a man may often play
a mid-iron shot out of the bunker where he should be forced to use a niblick. This
opens a pretty big subject and we know that the tendency is to make bunkers more
difficult. In the bunkers abroad on the seaside courses, the majority of them were
formed by nature and the slopes are easy; the only exception being where on
account of the shifting sand, they have been forced to put in railroad ties or similar
substance to keep the same from blowing. This had made a perfectly straight wall
but was not done with the intention of making it difficult to get out but merely to
retain the bunker as it exists. If we make the banks of every bunker so steep that
the very best player is forced to use a niblick to get out and the only hope he has
when he gets in is to be able to get his ball on the fairway again, why should we not
make a rule as we have at present with water hazards, when a man may, if he so
desires, drop back with the loss of a stroke. I thoroughly believe that for the good
of Golf, that we should not make our bunkers so difficult, that there is no choice
left in playing out of them and that the best and worst must use a niblick.”


-Hugh Wilson, 1916

[Ira Fishman]

Kyle,


You get a lot of play across your courses. Have you ever tracked which bunkers seldom find a shot ending up in them?


Thanks.


Ira

[Tom_Doak]

I was going to comment, but who wants to follow Hugh Wilson?  I'll wait a bit out of respect.


Sean, when you say "bold bunker placement," what sort of placement do you have in mind?  I agree that I rarely see a bunker that gives me pause, but it's not so easy to find a placement that doesn't really confound the average golfer, except for maybe the blind bunker over the back of a green.

[Kyle Harris]

Kyle,


You get a lot of play across your courses. Have you ever tracked which bunkers seldom find a shot ending up in them?


Thanks.


Ira

Tracked? No. But it becomes fairly obvious when you go to rake them.


I think the real question is how many bunkers influenced play due to their visual distraction/camoflouge or where they drew your eye. That's much harder to track and why Golf Architectures who actually build golf courses should/could weigh in vs. the armchair architects here. If you're referencing Streamsong, remember it's a sand-based site in the first place so having an area where grass wasn't planted and the sand kept exposed is the very definition of minimalism.

[Ira Fishman]

The point about bunkers influencing play because of the visual attraction/distraction/intimidation/camouflage is a great one. Some of the best holes at Streamsong have some aspect of the point. I particularly liked getting fooled the way SS 16 did on my one play. I will be curious if I am smart enough to not get fooled again on a return visit. I thought I would not fall for some of the bunker induced visual tricks on our return visit to Bandon Trails, but no such luck.


Ira

[David_Tepper]

If there are any participants on this board who get up and down out of the sand more than 25% of the time, please identify yourself.

[John Kavanaugh]

If there are any participants on this board who get up and down out of the sand more than 25% of the time, please identify yourself.

Do we have to putt? Getting to within 10’ out of a perfectly consistent manicured bunker is the easy part. Slower than tour greens don’t hurt.

[Jim Sherma]

I am currently living through a situation where the bunkers at my home courses are declining in their general maintenance and consistency. The amount of sand varies from a half inch to 6 inches depending on which bunker you're in and even which area of a given bunker your in (what's under your feet are often not indicative of what's under you ball). Also, the bunkers with deep sand are usually filled with cheap beach sand versus grittier bunker sand. The maintenance staff is trying to rake them to look "Aussie" style but only really ends up furrowing the center of the bunkers with a set of ridges defining the raked portion and often perpendicular to the line of play. It results in a total crap shoot as far as whether or not you will have a reasonable lie (fried eggs in loose sand or in a furrow/ridge of the aussie-raked sections) followed by a crap shoot as to what is actually under the ball in terms of type of sand and depth of sand. Honestly, it would be difficult to try to make bunkers this inconsistent even if you were trying to. Scoring has definitely been affected since a miss into the bunkers can result in lies that no amount of skill makes a difference and you're simply hoping to get out and not make some huge number.


This situation is not fun and does not make for good golf. I always considered myself a decent bunker player and certainly consider it a key part of the skill set needed to score well. Turning it into a 3/4 to 2+ shot penalty based on luck of the draw does not add anything good to the game.

[MCirba]

Always good to see the eminently sensible Hugh Wilson make an appearance.   

[Thomas Dai]

Time perhaps to delve into your own game and consider why you go into bunkers and any bunkers in particular.
One of my favourite golf books is Tommy Armours immodestly titled ‘How to play your best golf all the time’ and it contains a splendid section on course management and scoring. Notably he states “Play the shot you’ve got the greatest chance of playing well and play the shot that makes the next shot easy.”
Atb

[ward peyronnin]

What drives me crazy is the ubiquitous US convention of rimming bunkers with rough even when in the middle of the fairways


This doesn’t usually happen in the UK where balls are drawn into the sand.


Bad maintenance?

[Ben Hollerbach]

100% agree that bunkers have become overbearing and too often their existence is driven more based on aesthetics and framing vs. strategic benefit. Especially on relatively flat land, where a sea green provides very little contrast to the players eye. The bunker is seen as a tool to help frame the hole.

I would also agree that the high standard of bunker maintenance has an influence on the frequency of bunkers across a course. If playing out of a well manicured bunker is of a similar challenge to playing out of rough, the impact of the bunkers placement on a players round is not significant.

Which in lies the problem, If the modern bunker provides little strategic value to play and is mostly visual, does the visual benefits outweigh the additional maintenance cost? On the whole I'd say no. But I also believe that bunkers should provide a greater penalty to a player than surrounding rough. If a bunker is suppose to be a hazard, it should be maintained closer to that of a hazard.

If high level maintenance standards were lessened, and bunker conditions were left more up to chance, The penalty of playing a ball into a bunker would dramatically increase, causing the overall difficulty of courses with a very high number of bunkers to skyrocket. Courses electing to restore some more hazard to their bunkers would be best off dramatically reducing their bunker count. Choosing to keep only the most strategically valuable bunkers and converting the rest into grass bunkers.

It's probably not viable to allow the bunkers to be left up to nature for maintenance, but rather I'd like to see bunkers raked by the maintenance staff no more than twice a week( i.e. Mondays and Thursdays) and with a wide toothed rake. The goal would be to smooth out most of the large imprints and redistribute sand that across the bunker. Players can be asked to smooth over their own tracks after a shot, but between maintenance raking the bunkers would be left up to chance.

I recall a comment Ian Andrews made years ago about working with committees around tree removal, asking the members of the committee to each flag the 25 most critical trees on the property. I could see the same exercise being done with bunkers. If a bunker has no strategic value, remove it. By reducing the number of bunkers and increasing the challenge of a bunker recovery, each bunker's existence takes on a greater role, while allowing the course to be maintained at a lower cost.

[Cal Carlisle]

What drives me crazy is the ubiquitous US convention of rimming bunkers with rough even when in the middle of the fairways


This doesn’t usually happen in the UK where balls are drawn into the sand.


Bad maintenance?

Bad maintenance how? 

[Mike_Young]

100% agree that bunkers have become overbearing and too often their existence is driven more based on aesthetics and framing vs. strategic benefit. Especially on relatively flat land, where a sea green provides very little contrast to the players eye. The bunker is seen as a tool to help frame the hole.

I would also agree that the high standard of bunker maintenance has an influence on the frequency of bunkers across a course. If playing out of a well manicured bunker is of a similar challenge to playing out of rough, the impact of the bunkers placement on a players round is not significant.

Which in lies the problem, If the modern bunker provides little strategic value to play and is mostly visual, does the visual benefits outweigh the additional maintenance cost? On the whole I'd say no. But I also believe that bunkers should provide a greater penalty to a player than surrounding rough. If a bunker is suppose to be a hazard, it should be maintained closer to that of a hazard.

If high level maintenance standards were lessened, and bunker conditions were left more up to chance, The penalty of playing a ball into a bunker would dramatically increase, causing the overall difficulty of courses with a very high number of bunkers to skyrocket. Courses electing to restore some more hazard to their bunkers would be best off dramatically reducing their bunker count. Choosing to keep only the most strategically valuable bunkers and converting the rest into grass bunkers.

It's probably not viable to allow the bunkers to be left up to nature for maintenance, but rather I'd like to see bunkers raked by the maintenance staff no more than twice a week( i.e. Mondays and Thursdays) and with a wide toothed rake. The goal would be to smooth out most of the large imprints and redistribute sand that across the bunker. Players can be asked to smooth over their own tracks after a shot, but between maintenance raking the bunkers would be left up to chance.

I recall a comment Ian Andrews made years ago about working with committees around tree removal, asking the members of the committee to each flag the 25 most critical trees on the property. I could see the same exercise being done with bunkers. If a bunker has no strategic value, remove it. By reducing the number of bunkers and increasing the challenge of a bunker recovery, each bunker's existence takes on a greater role, while allowing the course to be maintained at a lower cost.

Ben,  Agree 100%.