Bunkers are supposed to be hazards. Not hell holes.
Counterintuitiveness is usually something to strive for in course design: Holes that look harder than they play; greens as flat as a pancake but punching above their putting weight; and pretty much any design feature that instills doubt only to seem like a bunch of nothing in hindsight.
Counterintuitiveness when it comes to bunkers? We’ve got that too. Just not in a sensible way.
The small St. Andrews scratches that started the whole notion of a sandy hazard centuries ago were kept around by those nurturing the Old Course along because they were there naturally and recognized as adding intrigue to the round. Even though they were rake-free, full of cruel West Sands beach, and the sand wedge had yet to be invented, they were tolerated. Most were accidentally placed or carved by sheep or swarms of divots. Eventually some were added by visionaries like Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris to force a cruel decision or mask a tough spot for growing grass. But outside of the massive Hell bunker and a few others, they were wee dots on the landscape.
The scrapes at St. Andrews and everywhere since have turned into ginormous black holes of money, labor, scale, and irrational counterintuitiveness. Not for entirely bad reasons: Bunkers tell us a lot about a course. Their lively, three-dimensional, and annoyingly placed beauty makes a course more exciting to tackle. The game would be bland without them.
But things have gone too far. We need to stop the worldwide madness of making bunkers bigger, deeper, costlier, and thought to need renovation when one out of a hundred golfers doesn’t draw a perfect lie.
Three developments have inspired the bunker’s march to counterintuitive excess: the camera lens, modern earthmoving equipment, and the ball flying farther than ever.
As courses are built with larger equipment in too big of a hurry—even some “minimalists” now farm out this delicate art to non-golf shapers—bunkers are increasingly dug by large excavators meant to strike oil, not etch artful designs in the dirt.
It’s that much crazier when some of the most influential, irritating, and defining bunkers in golf are tiny (the Road Hole, TPC Sawgrass’s 17th, the “Devil’s A**hole” at Pine Valley, etc.).
During the current restoration and renovation boom, courses have chosen to leave years of deepening—caused by exploding sand—in place rather than hit the reset button. Sometimes it’s an ill-considered strange counteroffensive against the longer distances of an elite few. The average hack, who rarely enjoys being humiliated, seems forgotten.
Making bunkers harder to enter and exit makes even less sense when gobs of money are spent to ensure a perfect lie since the pit is so deep! So we see sand trucked in from faraway places and treated like putting-surface turf to ensure everyone gets a perfect lie or can blast out 20 minutes after a downpour.
The deepening phenomenon was in evidence at the Masters this year as the able-bodied “athletes” of today struggled to get in and out of some of Augusta National’s bunkers. The surrounds are also swelling, sometimes from age, sometimes to keep a rush of water from hitting the bleached sand. While deepening the bunkers to keep the course relevant, the maintenance crew must also engage in hours of raking, wetting, packing, trimming, and cleaning to ensure the professionals, who’d play the Masters under any conditions, won’t be humiliated by a suspect lie.
LINKS readers have filled my inbox with stories of courses they are no longer interested in playing or paying for over the bunkering. Some are even thinking of giving up the game over the humiliation factor. Others just find it nonsensical, but don’t know how to counter the argument for huge, deep, and primped sand.
Wouldn’t the game be better for all and more interesting if sand pits were smaller and easy to access but totally unpredictable to play out of?
Golfers expect to find a perfect lie 24/7 because the golf course maintenance industry is darn good at what it does. It provides products that can deliver all types of sand, liners to keep rocks out or keep sand on the bunker face, fancy wetting agents to prevent fried eggs, and other tools to deliver idyllic bunker conditions.
The sport does not need to go all Tillinghast and start ordering bunkers filled in to offset costs as the great architect did for the PGA of America during the Depression. That would be counterintuitive knowing what we know about the power and fun of a well-placed, possibly hazardous bunker.
Instead, the golf industry should look to Pinehurst No. 2, where a wildly successful U.S. Open was just played with bunkers that were not particularly deep, featured natural sand, eschewed modern maintenance theatrics (other than some basic drainage), and were raked using the increasingly popular Australian-inspired process in which faces are firm and only the floors are regularly raked.
Those rustic sandy pits held their own against the best players in the world and still allowed Bryson DeChambeau to pull off the toughest shot of all: a long bunker recovery with OB waiting if he caught too much ball. His shot for the ages only validated how much a much more sensible approach to sand would serve the game well.
