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BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, MICH. — The Oakland Hills Country Club's South Course, where the PGA Championship will end Sunday, is the quintessential example of what's gone wrong with so much of golf course design.
The changes made since Donald Ross designed the course in 1916 have made it harder to the point of silliness, while eviscerating what he had intended.
Ross wanted the course to have width so that players could work their way into the fascinating greens by playing angles and to be able to use the slopes in and around them. Instead, the fairways are so narrow, and the rough so high, that the course tests only accuracy off the tee and the ability to hit high shots into the greens. The lack of width and the endless rough are far more insulting to Ross's design than the course's length.
None of this matters to J.B. Holmes, the long-ball smasher who shot 68 yesterday and whose one-under-par 139 after two rounds leads Charlie Wi, Ben Curtis and Justin Rose by one stroke.
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Holmes, like the majority of his fellow players, isn't an aficionado of architecture. Still, even he said Oakland Hills has "a lot of holes that are almost unplayable. They are a little ridiculous."
Then there's Lee Westwood. He missed the cut after shooting 77-78. After his first round, Westwood said: "The course is 7,500 yards long, the greens are firm and the pins are tucked away. They are sucking the fun out of the major championships when you get it set up like that."
Robert Allenby, on the cut line of 148, added: "They have taken an okay golf course and turned it into a lot of crap. That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it."
This all started when Robert Trent Jones Sr. revamped Ross's course for the 1951 U.S. Open. He filled in traps no longer in play for the professionals because they were driving the ball 250 yards rather than 230, and he added bunkers that would be in play. The United States Golf Association added deep rough.
Ben Hogan won the tournament with seven-over-par 287. Hogan said Jones's work took the strategy out of the course and famously referred to having brought "this course, this monster, to its knees."
The powers that be have continued to adhere to the philosophy that a monster course is the best course for a major tournament. For the PGA, Jones's son, Rees, lengthened 15 holes and altered or moved bunkers on 12 holes, while adding 18.
Oakland Hills represents the apotheosis of golf monster-dom. The best players in the game are reduced to one-dimensional golf.
Jeff Mingay, an astute young architect from Windsor, Ont., has a copy of Ross's plans for Oakland Hills and has studied them. Mingay walked the course on Thursday and will return tomorrow. He decries what's happened to the Ross masterpiece.
"Thoughtful golfers aren't permitted to play strategic angles, as they were over Ross's course," he said. "There's no option to drive to the extreme margin of a fairway that's only 26 yards wide to gain an advantageous angle of approach to a flagstick that's placed extreme right or extreme left. Ross incorporated such angles into his design at Oakland Hills. Trent Jones took them away, and they've never been returned."
It's easy to see how the course should play. The rough to the right of the 12th hole, for example, is full of humps and bumps. It should be fairway, not a stifling mane of high rough. Ross meant for the ground contours to matter, not to be covered by rough that looks like a hairpiece alongside every fairway and around every green.
It's too late for this week, but Westwood, asked what could be done to make the course a fair test, touched on one approach. "Cut all the rough out," he said.
He's on the right track, while Oakland Hills, meanwhile, is wrong. It's wrong based on what Ross wanted, and because it doesn't take the full measure of a player. It's wrong if interesting golf matters, for the spectator, to the club member, to the player who will win the PGA Championship.
