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When the Royal & Ancient Caesars made a call to partially clear out Royal Liverpool’s dreaded dugouts ahead of Round 2 of the 151st Open Championship, it was a decision most players undoubtedly embraced, even if they didn’t score with all of them.
“Not familiar,” Zack Johnson said when asked about the move. This was after a second round 69 that brought it to two for the week.
A reporter explained to the American Ryder Cup captain that in the aftermath of the first round—when balls were regularly trickled into the bunkers and settled within a few inches of the recycled acid walls, making extraction a strenuous, sometimes impossible, task—R&A chose to make digging less punishing by dredging sand up toward the walls, in effect creating a slope that would push more balls back toward the walls. The R&A’s official notice read, in part: “Yesterday afternoon the bunkers dried out more than we’ve seen in recent weeks, and this resulted in more balls running straight on the face than we would normally expect.”
“They made an announcement?” Johnson said, starting to smile. “Maybe I should have read that.”
Johnson’s indifference to championship cautions wasn’t the only explanation for his inattention. He was among the lucky few who largely avoided the bunkers on Friday, so he only had a few chances to inspect them.
“I think I only caught him in one sand trap or a bunker, fortunately,” he said.
Other players were less fortunate, which meant that by the end of the second round most of the court had had a chance to form an opinion about R&A’s unexpected change.
Like Johnson, Rory McIlroy was unaware of the new protocol when his second outing began. But when McIlroy threw his second shot into a bowl green dugout on the par 5, gentler slopes and kinder soon became apparent to him.
“I was pleasantly surprised that I got a chance,” he said, adding, “I wouldn’t say there’s a single person in this field who wouldn’t welcome this change.”
Perhaps, but there was at least one player with mixed feelings: Scotsman Ritchie Ramsey.
Ramsey, who got wind of the setup tweak not via an official player notice but on social media, said he not only noticed sand was packed at the base of the walls on Friday but that it may have been. also full.
He said that on the par-4 16th hole, he rammed a 4-iron into the breeze that found a green-side bunker—and a deadlocked lie. He had to bowl back, which resulted in a double-bogey 6. Two holes later, on the par-5 18th, he said he winded a 3-wood with his second shot that flew into a green bunker “like a rocket”. That ball was also blocked in the middle of the dugout. Ramsey said he could not tell if his shot had traveled up the wall and then rushed back into the unfortunate lie, or whether it had been buried in that spot.
“Only two are really shocking,” said Ramsey, who signed the 72-plus to drop it to three for the week. “I don’t know if it’s an anomaly or I don’t know if it’s something that happens on a regular basis. You just have to try and make it work, but I obviously wasn’t happy.” [with] 16 and 18 at the very least.
As is always the case with major league settings, striking a balance between the challenging and the unfair is a high-level job. This is true of green speed, fairway width and approximate length, but rarely has there been as much scrutiny on bunkers as there has been this week in the North West of England. Matthew Jordan, a member and record holder of Royal Liverpool, knows these bunkers as well as any player on the field.
After his second round 72 dropped him again to one level, he called the R&A’s decision “probably worth it,” but added, “I think we all want to see them as risks, right? We don’t want to see people batting in there, getting total lies and out there. It’s just hard to balance — I had a couple yesterday that were incredible. I’ve never seen that here before. I think that might have been the right decision, but at the same time, I support them all for being risks.” “.
Of the lies Ramsey faced, Jordan said: “Yeah, I think one thing that happens is if the ball flies in, it flies hard, it hits the face, and then because – it’s not steep, there’s a little bit of sand in there, so it’s just coming and going down and it’s semi-blocked, which isn’t great. I don’t know how the guys prepare, but it’s hard, right, to get it right? I think they’re close.”
Leave it to Jordan Spieth to deliver one of the most accurate take on the situation. In the first two rounds, Spieth mostly managed to avoid bunkers, so he didn’t spend much time analyzing their intensity. But he said he understood why flat rules could be a problem, if the boundaries weren’t so unfair.
“You have these downwind strokes where you can hit really great shots on the greens the way they ask you to play them,” he said. “And then they can basically end up — maybe sometimes more than a full penalty depending on where you end up, and you hit the right shot.
“Holees up in the wind don’t matter so much. Downwind holes make a big difference because the ball will keep chasing until you stop and if you have a little bit of a slope or the ball comes back a few inches from where it would have landed yesterday, it could mean getting it out of the bunker versus having to play backwards like Tony.” [Finau] Yesterday did in that hole.
“That’s a good example of a par-5 5. I saw some on the 18 yesterday too. That’s where you’re trying to get. I was 270 yards today, and I hit a 4 iron 5 yards from the front edge of the green, and then I can’t push my ball further than a few feet from the dugout, but that’s the Open Championship, and these bunkers make this golf course.”
Spieth, under the middle, eight from behind from Brian Harman, called the friction adjustment a “good move,” and added that “the rain will make a big difference tomorrow. I think it will make it more playable. The balls will bounce and move more towards the middle very slightly and you’ll be able to get more hits on the ball.”
Padraig Harrington, who has a triple cut to the figure and is playing in his 26th Open Championship, also agreed with the decision.
“The bunkers are still harsh without being absolute penalties,” he said. “Every stash on the Fairway is shreds. Lots of green stashes now with change that you can get out of but you don’t necessarily get the ups and downs. They still aren’t a great place to be.”
Nor should they be. After all, bunkers are designed to be avoided.
As Ramsey said, “On some of the courses we play, you actually look forward to being in the bunker, which is a free swing and you can control it. I don’t think that’s the way things have to be.”