Augusta Gets Roughed Up

An ironic twist has developed now that the Augusta National Golf Club has grown some rough along its fairways.

Over all the years, the club has subtly but undoubtedly made a point of separating itself from-actually standing above-the rest of the golf world. But the proud greencoats have succumbed to one of the baser emotions in the game, course pride. They have given in to the insidious urge to protect their course.

In so doing, they join a long list of skullduggerers going back at least to the early days of the pro tour who have doctored their beloved track to keep the best players from chewing it up like chopped liver.

Schemes abound in the anecdotal register. Tournament organizers used to heavily water the front half of a green while the back half was left very firm. The hole was then cut in the back. If you tried to bounce and run an approach to the pin, you got stuck up front. Fly it to the hole, and your ball bounded into a back bunker. More than once the members hosting a U.S. Open have gone against the USGA's dictate for length of rough and let the rough go wild. Augusta National has joined the club, if you please.

But will this stratagy, combined with lengthening the course, really make much difference? The pros, most of whom haven't seen the course this year, are saying the rough will make playing approaches much more difficult, even impossible. But the fairways are still as wide as ever, and the players are still going to be hitting short irons to all the par fours and most of the fives. Even if some of the shots are from the 1-3/8-inch long grass it isn't going to have that much effect. The rough grass isn't going to be tall and tangly, just a little longer lush stuff. A ball can be spun out of this grass with a wedge, even an 8-iron. We shall see.

And no one has commented on the increased length of the course, because it isn't all that much and it doesn't make any difference anyway. You really can't make a course too long for today's players.

How the so-called rough and a few longer holes will affect the scores is up for grabs at the moment, but what is perhaps more interesting is the precedent that has been set for the club. It is one that goes directly against the wishes of the club's most revered co-founder, Bobby Jones. Jones made a very definite point of not having any rough on his course, and the point was long taken to be written in stone. So what would Mr. Jones think of this new development? Revolting? Indeed, what would Mr. Jones think of his tournament in other respects as it has developed over the years since he had anything to say about it?

On the matter of rough, the guess here is that Jones would accede to the need for it. After all, he was a man who played all his great championship golf with hickory shafted clubs, but he later endorsed steel when it became the material of choice. He didn't demur at putting steel shafts in the Spalding clubs that came out under is name after he retired from amateur competition, and he used them when he made his honorary or emblematic appearances in the first few Masters. So Jones was no hard-rock traditionalist. He would have gone along with the rough.

Would Jones have agreed to redoing the greens in bent grass, as Hord Hardin did in the 70s when he was the tournament's chairman? The argument against bent has always been that because of the severe undulations in the greens, bent makes them too fast. The greens were designed with Bermuda grass in mind, and that is what they had always been grown in. It was considered fairer.

Byron Nelson has said that in his heyday at the Masters, when the greens were in Bermuda, they were just as fast as now if only because they played earlier in the spring when it was colder. The lower temperatures slowed the growth of the grass and made the greens firmer. Truth be told, for all the complaints about the speed of the bent grass greens at Augusta, even by Arnold himself, the putting isn't all that bad. In fact, the green speed has been the only real protection against today's players shooting the course in the 50s; more protective than the so-called rough now in place.

Nevertheless, I don't think Jones would have agreed on bentgrass greens. He understood very well what a combination of super fast and extremely undulated putting surfaces can do to the nerves, and it was his nerves that made him retire from the game.

When Jack Nicklaus won his second Masters with a 271 that beat Ben Hogan's previous record by three shots, Jones made the famous remark that Nicklaus played a game with which he was unfamiliar. What would the old master have thought of Tiger Woods' performance in winning with 270? I'm inclined to think Jones would have had some reservations. He of course had a fine eye for technique and probably would have seen in Woods' hyper-fast hip turn an element that could not always be controlled. What's more, Jones' remark about Nicklaus was in reference to his play at Augusta National in 1965, but he had seen Nicklaus win a U.S. Open ('62), not to say a previous Masters ('63), and thus recognized Jack's ability outside the friendlier-than-any-U.S. Open-confines of Augusta National.

As for Woods being the first person of color to win the Masters, I'm sure Jones would have been the traditional southern gentleman, a good sport about it. How sincere would that be? Jones has forever been anointed a saint, and the only time I met him -- a brief hello and handshake during the filming of Shell's Wonderful World of Golf program in Atlanta -- he seemed to be a very warm and caring person. But you have to remind yourself that he was a classic son of the American south who never did anything we know of to get black players into the Masters, or black members of the club. He would have thoroughly appreciated Woods' stunning performance, and let it be at that. It's called categorizing.

How about he increasing commercialism of the Masters? It is well known that Jones felt that calling it the Masters was a bit too pretentious and not the gentlemanly thing to do. Aside from the braggadocio element, another part of his hesitation may well have come out of his understanding of language --he was an excellent writer, as we know -- and the obvious fact that many in the field each year were not really masters of the game. That last still holds true, but Jones must have come around to accepting it.

As for the reputed few million dollars a year in revenue that is generated from the sale of belts, hats, shirts, bags, etc., in the huge tented store Augusta National operates near the entrance to the club during Masters week, I think Jones would have thought that was a fine thing. The Masters is famous for its public disdain of the mention of money in respect to its event. Jones may have been part of that guise, but remember that he quit amateur golf because he needed to make a living for his young family. He signed on to star in a series of instructional films that brought him considerable income, wrote highly successful instructional books and made that exceptionally lucrative deal with Spalding to put out the Bobby Jones line of clubs. Jones, in his later years, filed for reinstatement of his amateur status. It was a symbolic act only, but a confirmation that he did unquestionably trade in his golf reputation and had become a professional.

And finally, Augusta National Golf Club was founded by Jones and Roberts as a business venture. They were the sole owners of the club. Which is to say, Bobby Jones knew about making a buck, and was not averse to doing so.