Dustin Johnson figured his ball had settled on a worn-out area of land, but Rules Officials ruled it as a bunker and penalized Johnson for grounding his club. (Getty Images)
There has been a lot of chatter regarding the Dustin Johnson “Bunkergate” scandal. Some have even wondered if his two stroke penalty means Whistling Straits was bad architecture, or if architecture itself should be changed.
First, I say we wait a year and see if our perspective changes when we cool off.
Second, I hope that there is no move for more standardized golf course architecture because of one rules situation. Rules exist to support the game and dictate play, but not architecture.
This is particularly true of a course like Whistling Straits and an architect like Pete Dye! It is one of the most exciting modern courses, and like it or not, more major championships will be moving to newer courses, for length reasons if nothing else. (That is a whole different debate, however) So here we have a designer, owner and course that dared to think outside the (sand) box to create something unique enough to live the dream of holding multiple major championships.
That kind of design freedom and thinking is part of what makes the game great!
Letting an incident like this affect the creativity of modern architects would be a huge mistake. Too many people already think we should simply try to mimic what has been done in the past, but no endeavor moves forward by moving back.
As it happened, I turned on the TV just as Johnson stepped in the bunker, and had absolutely no doubt he simply made a mistake in grounding the club in a hazard. I saw sand, a lip, and a bunker like shape all around him.
Yes, there were footprints in the bunker, but we must remember the first American golf course architect – Charles Blair MacDonald – recommended that bunkers be maintained as if a herd of cheese heads, I mean, cavalry, had gone through. We finally saw a championship played under his ideal conditions, at least for the nearly 1000 bunkers not closely in play.
Sadly, it wasn’t a footprint or bad lie against a shaggy bank that caused the two stroke swing. This situation distracts from what we should have learned from the bunkers at Whistling Straits. It’s time to stop trying to perfect them into perfect playing surfaces, and let them go in order to make them mean something, and possibly make a difference in deciding a major championship because of their difficulty.
The bunkers at Whistling Straits are perhaps modeled after Scottish sand blow outs of the past, but more importantly, they might be the model for the bunker of the future!
