Lorne Rubenstein

Will graduated rough work at Winged Foot?
June 12, 2006

Now that the heart of the major championship season is here, it's appropriate, to ask this question: Is golf meant to be a fair game? Fair game for debate, don't you think?

Jack Nicklaus's efforts with the bunkers during the Memorial Tournament that he hosts tells us his response just now. Nicklaus had special rakes made up so that the bunkers could be furrowed. He'd had enough of all the talk about how far the ball is going and figured there wasn't much to be done about that.

Photo © Andy Lyons/Getty Images Furrowed bunkers at Memorial was very controversial among the players

But he could make the bunkers into authentic hazards and put a bit of fear in a player so that he wouldn't aim for bunkers.

Presto, bunkers became hazards and golf wasn't fair in the sense that one player could get an easy lie in the sand and another whose ball was an inch or two away would have little chance of stopping his ball anywhere near the hole. Finding a furrow meant, excuse the pun, that a player was in the no-spin zone. Even Fox's Bill O'Reilly couldn't have gotten out of that predicament.

It was a beautiful thing, as Champions Tour player Bruce Fleisher likes to say about golf in another context“when he makes a birdie, that is. But this was a beautiful thing because golfers were grumbling. Golf isn't an indoor game, right? What's wrong with it being unfair? The fairer and more predictable it is, the less interesting and challenging.

Photo © Travis Lindquist/Getty Image The rough at Winged Foot is suppose to be tiered to make drives further off the fairway more penal.

Now we're on the cusp of the U.S. Open at the Winged Foot Golf Club. The USGA has graduated the rough so that the player who hits the ball the furthest off line will have the worst lie. The golfer who graduates to become the U.S. Open champion will, presumably, have stayed out of the higher rough, which is being allowed to grow to eight inches.

Goodbye uniform rough. Spectators, move back. Hello looking for balls. The U.S. Open is bound to be penal. But good.

But wait. There's a problem here. The USGA seems to be trying to make golf fair by graduating its rough. Tiger Woods hits his drive into the primary rough, he has a play to the green.

Photo © Scott Halleran/Getty Images How much pitching out will there be this week from the thick rough at Winged Foot.

Phil Mickelson hits it into the seven-inch cabbage“and there's an inch left for a more wayward shot“he's pitching out.

Seems fair, right? The bigger the miss, the bigger the mess. But isn't there a problem with the philosophy? Isn't the USGA's Mike Davis, who is responsible for setting up the course, who plays to a 2.5 handicap index, and who knows the game cold, trying to conform to the notion that golf should be fair? Therein lies the crux of the debate proposed here.

Sure, it makes sense on the surface that the player who hits the most errant shot should find the deepest, thickest, rough that will put the hurt on his chances to recover. It's fair, but it can also be construed as moving golf in the direction of losing its soul. The game that was once a matter of hit it and find it and play it without complaint no matter the lie, no matter the good or bad luck, will be more uniform because of the graduated rough.

Fairer, that is. Please, no. Unfortunately, yes.

Golf is meant to trouble the mind. The player who can handle the anger and feeling of being victimized when he gets a ”bad’ break, should have an advantage. There's really no such thing as a ”bad’ break in golf. It's just golf. Deal with it.

That's what makes the Old Course in St. Andrews and all links courses and even all courses that aren't manicured just perfectly fun to play, and challenging. Pete Dye is always talking about the need to introduce confusion into a player's mind by providing shot options, so he creates all sorts of chipping and pitching areas around his greens. He sows doubt in a player's mind. That's a part of the game.

The possibility of doubt and confusion, and anger and anguish, is enhanced when a player hits his ball off-line and finds he has a marginal lie. Maybe some spectators have trampled down the turf so that there's a chance, just a chance, he can play the shot. But the USGA's graduated rough at Winged Foot is also moving spectators further back, so that they won't affect the lie“unless a player whacks one so far off-line that the folks are walking there.

Now for a bit of history, courtesy of Tom Watson. He was playing a qualifying round at Montifieth for the 1975 British Open at Carnoustie, when he hit what he thought was an ideal drive on the second hole. But it rolled 50 yards into a pot bunker. Fair? Unfair? Watson thought the latter.

Photo © David Cannon/ALLSPORT All of his years of experience taught Tom Watson that luck was all a part of the game especially at the British Open.

"I grew up playing target golf, where the ball stops quickly," he said. "I didn't like the bounce at first."

Watson learned to appreciate that the bounce of the ball and the luck of the lie were part of golf, its very soul, in fact. He'd rip a drive down the middle of the fairway and find his ball in a scrape left by a divot. Maybe one of the players in his group would rattle one off the trees, but the ball would bounce back into a perfect lie in the fairways.

Watson wouldn't react. He knew golf's not meant to be a fair game, and he'd just go ahead and hit his shot. Watson, of course, went on to win five British Opens, two Masters and one U.S. Open.

Now, the USGA has always been right on the line when it comes to the fair/unfair debate. Most people think the association crossed the line at Olympic in San Francisco in 1998 with a pin position on the 18th green that was impossible, and at the seventh green at Shinnecock Hills in 2004 when it was all but unplayable because it had little grass and far too much slope“the ball often wouldn't stop anywhere near where it landed.

But of course the USGA would cross the line from time to time. Setting up a course to examine the best golfers in the world can never be a perfect, closed science. Golf's played outdoors, not indoors. Why try to turn it into a controlled laboratory setting?

It will be interesting to see how the graduated rough approach plays out. It could make for too much cookie-cutter golf, and eliminate doubt and the rub of the green.

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair," Shakespeare wrote, long before anybody formalized the idea of whacking a ball cross-country toward a target. He captured the heart and soul of the game there.

Golf a fair game? Say it ain't so.