Executioner, flim-flam man:
USGA’s Davis changes golf
Golf has passed a turning point in its history, and who noticed? OAKMONT, Pa. -- Mike Davis is the kind of guy, when you run into him on the street, you hope he has time to grab a coffee. He is pleasant, bright, engaging. He would look at home in front of a college class, in a courtroom, on medical row, at your dinner table, and the like. He couldn’t sell you insurance or a used car. He lacks the capacity for deceit. There’s a lot of aw-shucks in the guy. And outwardly, there is nothing that stamps him as what he really is -- the Lord High Executioner of the U.S. Golf Association.
(He grinned at that.)
Davis’ organizational title is Senior Director of Rules and Competition, and as such he sets up the courses in the USGA’s 13 national championships, which move each year to different courses throughout the country. Setting up the courses means that he determines how long the holes will be, how wide the fairways, how deep the rough, how fast the greens will run, where the pins will be, etc.
This is not good news for the golfers this week in the U.S. Women’s Open at Oakmont, near Pittsburgh. It was Davis who set up Saucon Valley for the 2009 Women’s Open, and it took a grinding par by South Korea’s Eun-Hee Ji to win it. It was also Davis who set up Oakmont for the 2007 U.S. Open, won by – or “survived by” as some prefer to say – Argentina’s Angel Cabrera at 5 over par.
“We want the women to experience what the men had in ’07,” said Davis, an unabashed admirer of the storied course. “Oakmont might be the toughest test we have for the men, so it will be the toughest for women.” This didn’t mean the women would be playing the same course, just a shortened and modified version of it.
There is another aspect of Mike Davis that doesn’t really show.
Three-card monte, anyone?
Just step right up, sucker. Put down your money and find the queen.
Welcome to risk-reward golf, where the gift horse is giggling.
The U.S. Golf Association is the ruling body of golf. It makes the rules, sets equipment standards, conducts the championships and all that. It is the soul and Supreme Court of the game, thick with history and tradition. Getting the USGA to change anything is like getting a Spanish galleon to come about on its nose.
The USGA is notorious for turning benign and good courses into terrors. The PGA Tour, like the NBA, plays pretty for the people and wants scoring – birdies upon birdies, and so sets up courses to that end. For the USGA, par -- the score the expert makes -- is a great score.
Par still is. But the USGA has some new ideas on how the game can be played, and the most visible – by far the most fun – is the risk-reward approach. There is nothing new about the risk-reward. Simply put, it means that a hole offers a comparatively safe path to par, and also a different but promising path to a birdie – or to a bogey or worse if the gamble fails. The classic risk-reward hole is a par-4 that can be driven. Two notable such holes, well before modern technology, were the 310-yard 10th at the Belfry in England, and the 328-yard 12th at St. Andrews, with a trailing wind.
Make a hole easier? What a weird idea. But Davis pursued it with his boss, USGA Executive Director David Fay, who if he were the commissioner, baseball would get it right. Fay bought the idea, and so did the powers of the USGA, and now there’s a fresh little tremor rippling through the game.
“Sometime,” Davis said, “the architecture of a hole is right there, for excellent risk-reward. That’s the beauty of it. We can give the players more options. But they have to think – do you want to risk making a birdie or take the safer way and be sure of a par, and maybe get a birdie? Golf isn’t just hitting the ball. Golf is mental, golf is thinking.”
Given enough muscle, who could resist? Ulysses would understand. You can almost hear the siren song.
Davis first used a bit of risk-reward in the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot, but he had a luxury of riches at Oakmont on ’07 with two par-4s – No.2, ordinarily about 340 yards but shortened for ’07 Open, and the king of them all, the 300-yard 17th, an uphill, dogleg left. It’s a waif among Oakmont’s brutes, but it has been breaking hearts for over a hundred years. The hole was shoehorned into an awkward piece of the property, and there it sits to this day, still taunting golfers. For years, Oakmont had sought ways to make it harder.
“But why bother?” Davis said. With bunkers and rough and a wicked green, all it needed was a golfer willing to take it on. Most recently, there was Jim Furyk in the 2007 Open, trying heroically to drive it in the final round, missing the green and getting snarled in the rough. He also bogeyed the shortened No. 2, as did Tiger Woods, and they tied for second, a shot behind, taking their place in a history of victims that included Jimmy Thomson in 1935, who drove the green then marveled that he didn’t six-putt, and Phil Rodgers in 1962, trying to hack his ball out of a little evergreen, and so on. It’s one of the world’s great holes, not because it’s so hard but because it’s so tempting. They should erect a memorial slab at the 17th
For the Women’s Open, No. 2 will play at 250 yards a few times, and No. 17 from 245 – both well within reach of much of the field.
And then there’s this discovery – Oakmont’s par-3 16th, a grunt at 209 yards. But Davis found it’s only 135 from the far left tee– a simple wedge or 9-iron safely to the center of the green. To balance this generosity, the pin would be cut tight to the right front. So there’s a putt that can run right off the green. Going for the pin and missing right means a short-side return – an easy 4 or 5.
Lest anyone accuse Davis of being all heart, remember that he’s the guy in 2007 who made Oakmont’s par-3 No. 8 300 yards, and the par-5 12th 667, both U.S. Open record lengths.
Risk-reward will never be a tidal wave in golf, but it will remain a tactic that grips fans and befuddles golfers. We now routinely hear the announcers on the PGA Tour explain how the tee has been moved up on a given hole to give a bold golfer a chance to go for it. “That’s risk-reward,” the announcers offer. For the most part, the holes had always been there. But nobody thought to bring them within scaring distance.
And suddenly, there’s more fun in the game, and it seems there will be more.
It’s not often that a guy can change the course of golf, and Mike Davis is not happy that somebody suggests he himself is doing so. Still -- not to coin an expression -- it was Mike Davis who took the risk, and now golf is reaping the reward.
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