58 BUNKERLESS HOLES Sand bunkers are the golf architect’s crutch. If a hole is lacking, add some bunkers. If a hole is too easy, add some bunkers. If the edge of a hole is too punishing, add some ‘saving’ bunkers to catch balls before they encounter worse trouble. Bunkers, like golf, developed on the ancient links of Scotland. Here, they are essentially natural features. Grazing animals would shelter from the weather in low-lying areas, and their hooves would break the turf, exposing the sand underneath. The wind would remove more turf, increasing the size of the ‘bunker’. And early golfers, who simply played their game over the natural landscape, had to deal with these sandy blow-outs, which they found harder to play from than the turf that surrounded them. Eventually, as the game formalised and the first sets of rules were drawn up, and bunkers became officially hazards (though there was no mention of bunkers in the first Rules of Golf, drawn up by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744). By the time that golf started to move inland, though, in the second half of the nineteenth century (the first ‘golf boom’ was triggered by the invention of the gutty ball in 1848, which made the game more affordable), sand bunkers were established as a fundamental part of its vocabulary, and remained so even as courses were built on ground that had nothing much in common with the links, most specifically lacking native sand. “I wonder if they were the most easily replicable feature of the linksland that helped retain golf ’s spirit of adventure on less suited ground?” asks English designer Clyde Johnson. “It’s not like bunkers would have cost a bunch to build and maintain in the late 1800s/early 1900s. To a much lesser extent, I think they were probably an important tool in formalising golf courses, once they started being located closer to bigger bodies of populations and in shared space. Standardisation seemed a pretty important facet in Victorianage design.” We should remember that the creators of the earliest inland golf courses had no models to follow, except the links on which they grew up. Englishman Nick Norton says: “I think in early designs they were looking to recreate the links inland, so without them it would not be the same as golf as it was known. One has to make golf interesting and that requires obstacles and hazards. Sand does, in my opinion, make a good hazard. The ball is not lost, but the shot is difficult, and was more so before the sand wedge was invented. The same thought process probably went on 100+ years ago – dig a hole, chuck some sand in, job done. Then, once recognised (rightly or wrongly) as an essential hazard, they would have realised that they need to make them look good, and their ‘essential’ tag may have developed further – a virtuous (or vicious) circle.” “The early golf designers figured out that consequences were an interesting and necessary part of the game,” says American architect Kurt Bowman. “To me, golf isn’t very much fun without bunkers – they are the best form of hazard, better than out of bounds and better than water.” “The use of bunkers is analogous to something buildings architects have done for thousands of years – “ The early golf designers figured out that consequences were an interesting and necessary part of the game”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=