August 24th, 2007
ROAD HOLE TURNS BACK THE CLOCK It may have been controversial, it
THEY’VE remodelled the Road Hole bunker at St Andrews? For purists, this is like tweaking the Mona Lisa’s smile, or giving Michelangelo’s David a little nip and tuck.
However, the Old Course does get updated from time to time. When Tiger, Ernie, Phil, Vijay and friends pitch up this week, they will encounter a slightly longer course (7,279 yards), five new tees (two, four, 12, 13 and 14) and 94 of the Old Course’s 112 bunkers spruced up for the occasion.
But the most controversial change will be the tailoring done to the 455-yard, par4 17th - the Road Hole - notably to its greenside bunker. That notorious pit has been made three feet longer and about a foot wider and has had its front wall lowered six to eight inches. The contours around the bunker have been altered to allow more shots to roll in, and the sand floor reshaped to collect balls in the centre rather than let them come to rest near the wall. The new oval shape will gather more balls but should be easier to escape.
David Duval’s one-man excavation project at the 2000 Open, when he took four swings to get out of the bunker, may have left the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and the Links Trust management (who oversee this public golf course) sympathetic to the idea that changes ordered prior to the 1984 Open - when nearly all the Old Course’s major bunkers had their faces heightened - needed to be revisited. The Links Trust suggested in 2002 the bunker should be rebuilt, and work began.
Then reports circulated that the bunker had been moved back from the green and its height had been reduced by two feet, and all hell broke loose.
Gordon Moir, the Links Trust superintendent, recalls: : “We hadn’t even finished the work when David Malcolm, a past captain of the New Club, called the newspapers and said tampering with the bunker was going too far and it was ‘a loss and a tragedy’. The story went round the world, and Peter Mason at the Links Trust spent two days on the telephone fielding calls. Television news companies hired helicopters to fly over the Road Hole.” A decision was taken “to put everything back the way it was and let everyone calm down”.
When the changes were undone, the resulting shape was not an approximation of the Duval bunker but something rounder and not as deep. Kyle Phillips, who designed the much-praised Kingsbarns down the road, said: “That small circle I saw there last year was a tragedy.” Such controversy isn’t new. In 1869, the greens committee decided to fill in a bunker on the 15th. Three nights later, a local man, AG Sutherland, took a spade and dug the thing up again. No one has touched the “Sutherland bunker” since.
In anticipation of the 2005 Open, the R&A’s photographic and video archives were raided. A picture of Billy Casper splashing out of the bunker in 1967 showed an oval-shaped, waist-high trap that offered an easy escape sideways.
The 1978 Championship, when Japan’s Tommy Nakajima took five shots to get out of the bunker, was also studied.
It was determined that over time the bunker had indeed changed. For the 2005 Open it would be returned to its former oval, with the swales around it restored to gather more errant shots and the sandy bottom remade to keep balls from coming to rest by the wall.
David McLay Kidd, who designed Bandon Dunes and is creating the seventh public course for St Andrews, offers a thought for those worried about change.
“Most change on a golf course isn’t managed, ” he says. “Bunkers in constant play deepen and widen. Managed change, however, as it is on the Old Course, should be seen as a good thing.” A version of this article first appeared in American Express Travel and Leisure magazine.