Golf Course Architecture - Issue 65, July 2021

61 bunkers, opening up the entries, either removing the hazards, pulling them to the side or in some cases drawing them back into the fairway to provide for 25 or so yards of space beyond the sand for run up. The idea was to recreate Ross’s ground game options. The move makes the course more diverse and interesting for everyday golfers and gives elite players a chance to play recovery while rewarding the player who can properly judge the weight and bounce of an approach. In other words, players now have to think and tack their way around the course. Widening out the fairways has enhanced shot angle variety. This was made possible by a determined approach to tree management that recaptured the original sensibility of the land as a mixture of modestly wooded terrain and rolling meadow. In the process, the fairways regained their original width. Remember the famous nine-iron from 150 yards out that Gary Player hacked out of the rough to the sixteenth green as the culminating moment of the 1972 PGA Championship? That spot, commemorated by a plaque, is now firmly within the confines of Ross’s original fairway. That doesn’t detract at all from Player’s dramatics. But it does make for a better hole, one that now has many more strategic options off the tee because of a restored Ross fairway bunker on that far right side that now has to be negotiated (again, following its removal by Jones in 1951) if you are to reach the spot Player was in. On Oakland Hills’ famed fifteenth hole, a 396-yard dogleg left par four, Hanse introduced an interesting strategic twist. Ross’s original hole had an array of three bunkers short left of the dogleg on the inside, fairly tight to the tree line; the sand would have been more in play for the mid-tier golfer than for the elite player. Trent Jones’ 1951 modernisation introduced a bold element to the hole by shifting the hazard to a mid-fairway position that forced players of every skill level to deal with it – whether by playing short of it, driving to one or the other side onto fairway, or carrying it outright 265 yards. Later on, Rees Jones doubled up on the mid-fairway hazard, extending the carry and creating a bit more bailout to the right. Hanse’s version keeps the Jones iteration of a central hazard and combines it with Ross’s original diagonal array to create options for every player. A lay up short of the three bunkers strung across the fairway leaves 145 yards in. A 295-yard carry from the back tee clears everything, though room starts running out on the right, and if the ball travels 320 yards it winds up in a new fairway bunker on the far side The green complex on the par-four sixteenth now bears much more of a resemblance to Ross’s original, as seen in the 1937 image below Photo: Larry Lambrecht