Tag Archives: Bobby Jones

Masters Countdown: Fifth Hole

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Augusta National's fifth green in 1935.

The fifth hole is the centerpiece of what has sometimes been called Augusta National’s other Amen Corner. It’s ranked by more than a few players as the second best par-four on the course (after the tenth), and television cameras don’t do justice to its dramatic topography. Alister MacKenzie, who designed the course, felt that the fifth was descended in spirit from the Road Hole—the much feared seventeenth hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews. The main similarity may be in the difficulty of the approach shot, since balls that land short invariably stay short, while balls that are hit long occasionally disappear for good in the trees and shrubbery beyond the green. The perils of the green make Jack Nicklaus’s achievement during the 1996 Masters seem all the more astonishing: he eagled the fifth twice, in consecutive rounds.

The pair of large, steep bunkers on the left side of the fairway are a characteristic MacKenzie hazard. (Equally characteristically, Bobby Jones initially felt that the bunkers were superfluous, and they were not added until after the course had opened.) As originally positioned, they were more of a visual hazard than an actual one, since even in the early years players didn’t have much trouble driving over them or playing safely to the right. (The bunkers often aided less skilled players, by stopping pulled or hooked drives that might otherwise have run down the steep hill and out of play—as Wendell Miller, the contractor, predicted they would, in May, 1933, while making an unsuccessful attempt to interest Jones in adding the bunkers then.) MacKenzie, throughout his career as an architect, made frequent use of course features that were essentially optical illusions: seemingly narrow fairways that were ampler than they appeared from the tee; seemingly ample fairways on which the ideal landing areas were narrow and precise; large greens that seemed to provide huge targets but were contoured so that reasonably simple putts could be earned only with brilliant approaches—and bunkers that looked threatening from a distance but were easy to carry. He felt that easily avoided fairway bunkers were good for a player’s self-confidence and sense of achievement.

By 2002, the bunkers had long since ceased to serve even as visual hazards for the vast majority of Masters competitors. Under the direction of Tom Fazio, the tournament tees were moved back, the fairway was reconfigured, and the bunkers were reshaped, deepened, and moved closer to the green. The carry over the farther bunker from the Masters tees is now more than 315 yards, uphill, and both bunkers are so deep that reaching the green from either one is impossible, or nearly so. Each bunker has an almost vertical forward face, on which a thin layer of sand is held in place by a fabric liner, which also prevents balls from becoming embedded.

The fifth fairway caused problems for many years. Buried stones continually worked their way to the surface, where they were a threat to golf swings and mower blades. Finally, in 1962, the club resurfaced the fairway (and also the seventh) with new topsoil. When the job was complete, Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, devised a characteristically simple method of testing the results: he asked Phil Wahl, the club’s manager, to drive a golf cart up and down the fairway at full speed and report back on the smoothness of the ride.

Masters Countdown: Third Hole

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Augusta National's third green, 1935.

Augusta National’s third hole has probably undergone fewer changes than any other hole on the course. Its principal feature today, as was true in the beginning, is a treacherously shaped green, which sits on a tilted natural plateau. Dropping off from the shallow left end of the green is a deep bunker from which pars can be difficult to save. The green is hard to hit and harder to hold, and approaches to it are complicated by the fact that the putting surface is invisible from the fairway.

In 1933, Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, wrote a letter to Alister MacKenzie, who had designed the course, in which he suggested adding a deep cross bunker in the face of the plateau directly in front of the green. “It was my understanding,” Roberts wrote, “that the deep-face trap located in about the center would make this a definite drive and pitch hole; that is to say, a well struck pitch would be required in order to hold the green and the trap would make it impossible to play a run-up shot.” MacKenzie was vehement in vetoing that idea—which Roberts had admitted Jones didn’t support—and his response contains so much of his thinking about design that it is worth quoting at length:

I am delighted that Bob agrees that the [third] with the one trap is all right. This confirms my impression that Bob knows more about golf and its sound principles than any man I have ever come across.

My own opinion is that a cross bunker would convert it into an ordinary stereotyped hole and would nullify all the subtleties of the undulations of the approach to which we gave so much time and thought.

Consider the many problems which face a golfer approaching the hole. In the first place he can play safely to the right and rely on a long putt going dead to get his four. If he elects to go straight at the flag he must play a perfect pitch or else his ball would hit the bank and come back or run over the green. On the other hand if he tries to run up from the right his shot must be played perfectly as a half hearted run up shot will inevitably run into the bunker on the left, which appears to me to be absolutely perfect both in regard to its position and its construction.

At this hole the super golfer, like Bob, has a most fascinating problem, as to have a reasonable chance of three he will have to attack the hole from the left, where all the slopes help him towards the hole. It is here that the tee-shot bunker comes in as he must make up his mind to play round it with a pulled shot from right to left or a fade from left to right, or, when a strong wind is in his favour, to play over it.

If the approach to this hole is maintained as hard and as true as the green it will make the most perfect hole of its length in the world of golf and any additional bunker would ruin it.

It is holes of this description that keep up one’s interest in golf year after year, stimulate players to improve their game and prevent golf becoming stale.

Jones didn’t think as highly of the third hole as MacKenzie did; his favorite par-fours almost all required long-iron or fairway-wood approaches—shots at which he excelled. But MacKenzie’s conviction has been borne out over the years. Of all the architects who have worked on the course, none has yet made a persuasive case for a major revision. (The single original fairway bunker became a cluster of four fairway bunkers in 1983, but the impact on tee shots didn’t change.) The third hole remains the shortest par-four on the course, yet it was one of the few holes that consistently gave Tiger Woods trouble during his record victory in 1997. (On Friday, he hit a bullet-like drive to within fifteen yards of the green, yet made a bogey.) In fact, the experience of Woods and other long-hitting players suggests that one effective way to “Tiger-proof” a golf hole may be to shorten it.

 

Alister MacKenzie

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Alister MacKenzie and his wife, Hilda, on the fifteenth green at Cypress Point.

Obsessive students of golf architecture should file away the latest revision of a comprehensive chronology of the life of Alister MacKenzie, the designer of Augusta National, Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and a number of other courses worth scheming to play. The chronology is the work of Neil Crafter and the AM Research Team, in Adelaide, Australia, and it contains contributions from many people (including, in a very small way, me). Crafter, in a cover note, writes, “Sean Tully in San Francisco and Bob Beck in Santa Cruz have been most diligent in researching Mackenzie’s time in the USA, and Bob has unearthed records from Cypress Point that show when Mackenzie stayed overnight in the clubhouse and even what he ate for his meals! It is staggering that 80 or more years on we can get down to this level of detail about the life of Alister Mackenzie.” Even if you feel you already know everything you need to know about MacKenzie’s diet, the chronology contains many interesting facts.

Incidentally, the images above and below also appear in my book The Making of the Masters, which is now selling on Amazon for practically nothing. Below is MacKenzie’s original watercolor sketch of the routing of Augusta National. In it, the holes are numbered as they are today. MacKenzie later switched the nines; the club, after the first Masters, switched them back, because the current first nine thawed first on frosty mornings. Note the 90-yard 19th hole, near the clubhouse, squeezed between the 9th and 18th greens. MacKenzie explained the idea in a letter to Clifford Roberts, the club’s founding chairman: “Bobby Jones and some of the other directors thought it might be interesting to have a real 19th hole so that the loser could have the opportunity of getting his money back by playing double or quits. This 19th Hole will be an attractive plateau green, narrow at one end where the flag will usually be placed but wide at the other end so as to give a safety route to the player who has not the courage or the skill to pitch to the narrow end of the green.” The club, in those days, didn’t have the money to build it, and Jones and Roberts, in any event, worried that it would block the view of anyone in the clubhouse who was trying to watch whatever was happening on the 18th. Cool idea, though.