John Huggan: New broom plans to rough up the establishment – but in a fair way

Published on Saturday 7 June 2008 20:10

DULL. UNIMAGINATIVE. One-dimensional. Boring. These are all adjectives that can legitimately be applied to almost any US Open played over the last six decades or so. Ever since the post-war confirmation of Ben Hogan as a truly great player who built his success around the robotic hitting of fairways and greens, the United States Golf Association has spent one week every year trying to identify 'the Hawk's' grim and humourless successor.

The formula for doing so is both simple and diabolical. In one of golf's great ironies, a difficult course is the easiest thing in the world to create. The greens? Concrete. The fairways? Narrow strips. The rough? Long and lush, right to the very edge of the fairways and putting surfaces, so that only one shot remains – the 'hit and hope' hack. The results? For the players, the almost total exclusion of imagination and flair, replaced instead by the same vacuous test of execution time after time; for the spectators, mind-numbing boredom watching an endless stream of players hitting the same shot from the same places to the same places.

"I'm never going to apologise for the way in which US Open courses are set up," insists David Fay, executive director of the USGA. "I've always liked that we have the toughest test of the year and I think that, once a year, golfers enjoy watching the very best players hit shots similar to those they play themselves."

Whether that is, in fact, the case – and let's hope it isn't – it would appear that things are changing. Under the stewardship of Mike Davis, the USGA's Director of Rules and Competitions, the way US Open courses are presented to the world's best players is becoming less dictatorial and more encouraging of independent-minded decision-making. In other words, a golfer like Nick Faldo will like it less; a more spontaneous individual like Seve Ballesteros will like it more.

Perhaps the biggest change Davis has instituted since taking over the US Open course set-up in 2006 is the introduction of what he calls 'graduated rough,' whereby the more a player strays off-line the more he will be punished.

"One of the things about US Open rough was that it frustrated people," he explains. "I know it frustrated me. The guy who just missed a fairway by a few paces had to chop out. Then we had the guy who hit a shot outside the rope line; he could create a shot and had a chance to recover. That's why we came up with the idea of the graduated rough.

"The concept is that, if a guy misses a fairway by 25 feet or less, he will have an opportunity to create a shot and get the ball to the green – if he is good enough. All we really want to do is take the spin off the ball and make it more difficult but not impossible for him to control his distance.

"The great thing about that scenario is that it brings more numbers into play. I have long argued that we'd see that scores actually go up if you tempt players into going for shots they maybe shouldn't go for."

This, of course, is a huge departure from days gone by, when the gap in philosophy between officialdom and players was as wide as the Grand Canyon. Australian Peter O'Malley still shakes his head in wonder at the response of the USGA referee to whom he complained when it became obvious that he – and many others – was physically incapable of reaching the 10th fairway at Bethpage Black during the '02 US Open. "Where in the rule book does it say that you have to be able to reach the fairway?" asked the blue-blazered dolt, presumably rhetorically.

Happily, Davis' philosophy on how golf should be played at the highest level makes much more sense. But there is still an annual battle with the host club to overcome.

"When we set up a US Open course, there is invariably a sense of pride in the host club," he continues. "They want to see the course play as hard as possible. I've never seen an instance where the USGA have wanted the course to play harder than the members have. That doesn't mean there is anything wrong with the host club – they should be proud of their course – but hard is not necessarily good."

Okay, but what about all that rubbish we typically see around the greens, the rough that all but eliminated pitching and chipping and reduced the Seves of the world to the same gouging level attainable by everyone else?

"Greenside rough has always been a frustration for me," acknowledges Davis. "At some venues, the course design has always had primary rough around the greens. Part of me wants to go to those places and change that. Should we put closely mown areas around greens, where they have never been? I say we can and it has been done. At Torrey Pines, for example, we found a neat area left of the 7th green. So we put that in."

Still, for all his somewhat revolutionary theories on rough – at least by USGA standards – the biggest change Davis is bringing to the US Open is a whole new philosophy on the risk-and-reward aspect of the game that makes links golf so appealing. Which is why the players this coming week are going to be faced with four slightly different versions of Torrey Pines.

"Before I took over, there was a long-standing policy that, as soon as the location of the tee was established that was where you played from," says Davis. "I want to get away from that. I want us to start mixing up tee markers. I think that offers more of challenge. One day you are at 470-yards, the next day the hole plays 410-yards. Suddenly, the drive zone has changed and the player has to think about it differently.

"That sort of thing works particularly well on par-3s. I have really been mixing up the teeing grounds at Torrey Pines. For example, on the downhill 3rd hole, we won't be playing from the back tee on maybe two of the days. I found this really neat little tee, way to the left and way up in the sky. So the hole will play at about 140-yards, straight downhill and into the prevailing wind. Players will be trying to keep wedges low into the wind and it will be great fun.

"Most of all though, what people want to see is situations where guys can make anything from eagle to double-bogey. That's what I want to see more of at the US Open. I want to get away from this 'par or bogey' scenario we have seen so much of when a player misses a fairway on a par-4 then hits wedge-wedge to 10 feet.

"The USGA still wants it to be the hardest test, but I think we can achieve that in a more interesting way. That's our goal."

And a noble one it is too. Let's hope he succeeds.