National Offense

“As in the past, our objective is to maintain the integrity and shot values of the golf course as envisioned by Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie,” said Augusta National Chairman Hootie Johnson in announcing the changes.

R-i-i-i-i-g-h-t.

Let’s face it. If Jones and Mackenzie had been cryogenically preserved and brought back to life, they’d take one look at what has happened to their course and head straight back to the freezer. Augusta National is no longer a Jones/Mackenzie course—it’s a Jones/Mackenzie/Clifford Roberts/Perry Maxwell/ Robert Trent Jones/George Cobb/John LaFoy/George Fazio/Joe Finger/Byron Nelson/Jay Morrish/Bob Cupp/Jack Nicklaus/Tom Fazio course—and in the process of all that revision the guys at the wheel have, to borrow a Scot’s expression, lost the plot.

Hootie, if you think your founding architects would approve of what you and your predecessor chairmen have wrought, it’s time you started reading something other than putts. Pick up a copy of Mackenzie’s The Spirit of St. Andrews, written in 1932, the year he completed Augusta National. Among his views:

• Courses are ruined by the well-intentioned but injudicious attempts of their green committees to improve upon nature.

• The more money clubs have had to spend, the more their courses have deteriorated.

• It is possible to have too high a degree of perfection.

As for Jones, he felt an ideal golf course should:

• Give pleasure to the greatest possible number of players.

• Require strategic thought as well as skill.

Somehow, I doubt climate-controlled greens, talcum-powder bunkers, meticulously manicured fairways and ponds dyed the color ofaftershave are quite what Alister and Bobby had in mind. Nor is a 7,445-yard golf course with two par 4s of more than 490 yards, no matter how far the pros are hitting the ball.

But don’t take my word for it. Let’s take a look at the latest raft of alterations and see what the Good Doctor had to say about the issue.

Hole No. 1: The tee has been moved back 20 yards. Trees have been added to the left side of the fairway. New yardage: 455.

Mackenzie: “When discussing the question of altering a hole, the chief consideration that should exercise the mind is, ‘Are we going to add appreciably to the interest and excitement of the hole?’”

Once a masterpiece of minimalist design, No. 1 has lost its charm. Most of the field now will be incapable of carrying the crest of the hill, let alone the bunker on the right side of the fairway, leaving mid- to long-iron approach shots from an uphill stance. The hole’s brilliant strategy—offering all players the chance to take on the bunker in exchange for a simpler shot to the green—is now all but irrelevant.

Hole No. 4: The tee has been moved back 35 yards. New yardage: 240.

Mackenzie: “How often have I seen a golf course ruined in the attempt to extend it to what is generally considered championship length.”

It’s not as if the pros have massacred this hole—last year it was the third hardest on the course. Originally designed to mimic the artful 11th at the Old Course at St. Andrews—a hole of 172 yards—it has become just a glorified wallop. I think they lengthened this one simply because they could.

Hole No. 7: The tee has been moved back 40 yards. The green has been re-grassed to create a right-rear pin position. Trees have been added to both sides of the fairway. New yardage: 450.

Mackenzie: “There should be infinite variety in the strokes required to play the various holes—that is, interesting brassie shots, iron shots, pitch and run up shots.”

The seventh began as a drive-and-pitch par 4, modeled after the 18th at the Old Course. Within five years the green was moved uphill and barricaded with bunkers. So much for the pitch. Still, for decades it at least remained, along with No. 3, a rare and refreshing short par 4, played with long irons from the tee and short irons into the green. Now it’s a drive and a 6- or 7-iron to a green designed to welcome a wedge, and there’s little room for error—or imagination—on either shot.

Hole No. 11: The tee has been moved back 15 yards. Trees have been added to the right side of the fairway, which has been shifted to the left. New yardage: 505.

Mackenzie: “Playing down fairways bordered by straight lines of trees is not only unartistic but makes for tedious and uninteresting golf.”

There are now more than 40 pines in an area that, not long ago, was a wide-open bailout zone. The hole, which once offered multiple options from tee to green, now simply requires players to beat it hard and straight twice, or else. Strategic golf, the philosophy Mackenzie and Jones so fervently embraced, has turned into penal golf.

Hole No. 15: The tee has been moved back 30 yards and shifted approximately 20 yards to the left. New yardage: 530.

OK, I suspect the creators would have few, if any, quarrels here. From the tee, the 15th has always been a visually uninspiring hole, and repositioning the blocks may help. More important, it will force more players to pause before gunning their second shots to the pond-guarded green, and that will add some excitement.

Hole No. 17: The tee has been moved back 15 yards. New yardage: 440.

Mackenzie: See excerpt from first hole.

The dullest hole on the finishing stretch has just become duller. Increased distance will add neither interest nor excitement, just difficulty.

Overall, Mackenzie’s most telling comment may have been this: “If a course ever has to be altered, it means that the architect was wrong in the first place.” Truth is, Mackenzie and Jones made not one but two fundamental misjudgments at Augusta National.

First, they tried too hard to import the playing characteristics of a Scottish links. Both were big fans of the Old Course, and in Augusta National they hoped to instill some of the “pleasurable excitement of links golf.”

“There is great fascination,” wrote Mackenzie, “in playing a shot with a maximum of topspin and seeing one’s ball climbing over hillocks, through hollows, curving right to left or left to right and finally lying dead at the hole. ... There is nothing like the same excitement in watching the flight of a ball through the air.”

A noble—and if you’ll excuse some editorializing, totally accurate—view, but it works best on sandy, seaside turf, not Georgia clay. At Augusta the ground game was doomed from the beginning, and its design catered to one class of player—the guy who could hit it a mile off the tee and play short, high-lofted approaches that stop quickly—and the only way to thwart such a player is to give him a longer distance to toss his darts.

None of that would ever have mattered if not for the second miscalculation. No one anticipated the course would hold a professional tournament, let alone an iconic major. Jones wanted nothing more than “a retreat” for himself and his cronies. Mackenzie, to his credit, was aware of the advancing distance of the ball, and he routed the course in a double loop that allowed some elasticity in the tees. But it’s a safe bet he didn’t expect his baby to stretch more than 700 yards.

The worst part is that all the lengthening has had little effect on Tiger and Co. Last year Woods and Chris DiMarco tied for first at 12 under par. Three months later, Tiger won the Open Championship by five strokes with a score of 14 under on the Old Course, which was similar in scorecard distance to Augusta National but played much, much shorter. (Tiger’s drives at Augusta averaged 292 yards; his drives on the Old Course averaged 341.)

One could argue, of course, that the Masters scores were low because Augusta had received some green-softening rain—that if it had been dry and fast for four days the drives would have been longer but the scores would have been higher. Fine. You could also argue that, over four days at St. Andrews, there was barely a breath of wind, the element that puts the teeth in any links course.

Yet the old lady held up well. She held up because the game played here for those four days was the same game that has been played here for four centuries, a game calling for not just artillery practice but a full measure of imagination, creativity and control.

“St. Andrews retains its pristine charm. I doubt if even in 100 years’ time a course will be made which has such interesting strategic problems or creates such varied shots. It is the standing example of a course which is pleasurable to all classes of golfers, not only to the 30-handicappers but to the plus-14 man if there ever was or will be such a person.”

So said Dr. Mackenzie, and I couldn’t agree more.