Golf Course Architecture - Issue 63, January 2021

WELCOME 1 The bunker equation S and bunkers are perhaps the single most recognisable visible feature of a golf course. Born on the links, they have since colonised every environment in which golf is played, from mountain, through clay parkland, to rocky desert. Over the years they have changed from rough and ready holes in the ground filled with whatever material came to hand into manicured pits, with expensive, carefully graded sand buffed and raked to within an inch of its life. Bunkers take up an inordinate amount of greens crew time, certainly when compared to the proportion of shots hit from them, and in virtually every club member survey, they come out as the biggest source of discontent among golfers. And yet, not only do bunkers continue to be built on virtually every golf course, they are first in line when clubs spend on renovations. When golfers see photographs of new courses, it isn’t the green contouring they remark on. It is the bunkers. Building dramatic bunkers has long been a surefire way for a course to attract attention. Dr Alister MacKenzie’s iconic American projects, such as Cypress Point and Pasatiempo, are universally hailed as masterpieces, but was it not the attention given to those courses that gave later, and perhaps less talented, architects the notion that fancy bunkers equals success? Right at the end of his career at Augusta, MacKenzie recanted on his heavy use of sand and built a course with minimal bunkers. But by then, had the damage been done? We have seen, all across the world, a parade of bunkers built not to set up the strategy of the golf hole, but for reasons that are primarily visual. We see clusters of bunkers built where the weakest golfer, who ends up in the furthest from the green, has to carry perhaps forty yards of sand to reach the putting surface – an impossible shot for most long handicappers. It’s time for golf architecture to break away from the crutch that sand bunkers have become. For architects to use their imagination and create hazards that don’t penalise the weak more than the strong and soak up money. It’s time for something new. ADAM LAWRENCE