Here's a good read from Ron Whitten regarding the Redan. The main focus is the 7th at Shinnecock during the US Open.
The Redan Hole
by Ron Whitten
I really don't get it. One of architecture's most beloved par 3s - the Redan Hole, with its pitched, sloping green that runs right to left and front to back - became one of championship golf's most hated holes at the 2004 U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. Players called it unfair, spectators gave it catcalls and golf writers termed it a travesty.
Doesn't anyone know how to play that hole?
I confess I did not attend the 2004 U.S. Open. What I know about the play on Shinnecock's seventh is based upon news reports and television coverage, particular evening wrap-ups on The Golf Channel, which seemed to delight in replaying various spinouts and pileups around the seventh green.
The 7th hole at Shinnecock was the center of controversy - and high scores - at this summer's U.S. Open.
Hardly anybody in the Open played the Redan the way it's supposed to be played. Most of the shots played to the seventh were fired at the flag. Balls ended up short, in the deep diagonal bunker in front of the green, some landed pin high and rolled downhill to the back left corner and many bounded past the flag and into the back bunker. If you know anything about architecture, you know the way to play Shinnecock's Redan hole is to aim at the top, the right front corner, regardless of where the pin is located, then let the ball roll onto the green and let gravity feed the ball down to the flag. In four days of network coverage (which, admittedly, did not touch much on the seventh hole, I saw only one golfer play the Redan that way. I also saw Phil Mickelson go for the flag, as did Tiger Woods and Ernie Els and many others. On Saturday, only 27 percent of the field hit the green. On Sunday, only 15 percent, but one of those was Tim Herron, paired with Tiger that day. Herron played it correctly, hitting short right of the green, bouncing it onto the surface and rolling it down to the hole, which was in the right center. Herron's shot stopped 15 feet away and he made his putt for birdie.
The problem at Shinnecock was exacerbated by the extremely harsh maintenance to its greens that week, cut to a tenth of an inch and then rolled for additional smoothness (and swiftness). With very little irrigation all week, the greens were stressed out, which became clear at the Redan hole on early Sunday. Kevin Stadler and J.J. Henry, in the group first out, both triple-bogeyed the hole, then watched a crew lightly water the putting surface as they left. Ain't fair, Stadler later said. "I don't know how they're going to justify having the golf course play equal. It was borderline unfair to start with, and then they made it softer for everybody right behind us."
For a time, the green was syringed between groups, then between every two groups. Just for a few minutes, enough to keep the grass cool and alive, not nearly enough to saturate the surface or reach grassroots. But players were certain that others were getting a spongy Redan, while they weren't. Chris DiMarco bogeyed, then watched the hoses come out after he left the green, and cursed at officials. "Everybody should have had the same thing. If you're going to syringe it for one group and not syringe it for another, I think that's wrong. It's not golf. It was wrong and I let them know that," he told Golf World magazine.
Query to Stadler, DiMarco and others: Should greens not be syringed during tournament play if the temperatures get so warm as to put the turf in jeopardy? So what if that little bit of water slightly alters the playing characteristics of the hole? Don't rain squalls do the same thing? Don't gusts of wind? It's an outdoor game, guys. Conditions change constantly. You complain about unfairness. Would you rather go back to the old days, when anytime it rained, the entire round was cancelled, including rounds already posted, in the interest of fairness? Of course not.
After the tournament, I spoke with Mike Davis, the U.S. Golf Association's Championship Director. It's always tough to maintain consistent green speeds when one green has considerably more contour than the other 17, he said. In hindsight, maybe the USGA should have mowed the Redan green at a higher cut. But I think the fact that this Redan was rock hard and mowed so tight as to look light brown from the tee ought to have persuaded some players, or at least their caddies, that they needed to be a bit more creative on their tee shots. Granted, conditions in a U.S. Open don't usually reward creativity. Just ask Seve Ballesteros. But it's a game of how many, not how.
DiMarco offered his solution to Shinnecock's Redan to Golf World magazine. "They just need to redo that green," he said. "The seventh hole had been sitting there for five years. There's one hole out of control every year [for a U.S. Open]. It's just unfair. It's not golf."
With due respect to DiMarco, who is a top-flight player and a nice guy to boot, the game will be poorer if we start going around obliterating classic old Redan greens because modern players can't play their usual game of darts on them. The Redan, originally created by Davie Strath at Scotland's North Berwick, and popularized in the United States by C.B. Macdonald and Seth Raynor some 90 years ago, has withstood the tests of time, through hickory shafts, steel shafts and graphite, through gutta perchas, Haskell balls, balata and now solid ones. If the game is indeed returning to its old bump-and-run, play-it-along-the-ground roots, then Redan holes ought to be cherished and trumpeted, not bulldozed into submission.
Forty years ago, a great many Redan copies on American courses did have their features altered. Greens were reduced in size to accommodate the turning radius of riding mowers and to fit irrigation heads for automatic sprinkler systems. Deep bunkers were filled in to allow the use of motorized rakes and to permit older golfers egress. Luckily, the land forms themselves, always looking like the listing bow of a sinking ship, were retained, and in recent years many a Redan par 3 has been reclaimed. They've done so at the Seth Raynor-designed Blue Mound Golf and Country Club (where once the back portion of the green contained a row of spruce trees), and are attempting to do so at Somerset Country Club in Mendota Heights, Minn., where the Redan is just about the only remaining evidence of Raynor's original layout.
If DiMarco is correct, and every U.S. Open has at least one "out of control" green each year (think of the 18th greens at Olympic and Southern Hills), then the solution is to raise the height of cut on those greens, not dig up those putting surfaces and flatten them. Especially not a classic Redan green.
Golf holes exist for players - whether championship caliber or high handicap hacker - to analyze a correct manner of play, and then execute that manner. Firing at the flag should not be the correct manner of play very often, and should never be so on a Redan.
One last note about Shinnecock's Redan in the 2004 Open: Retief Goosen was one of only six players to par the Redan hole all four rounds. Not surprisingly, he won the championship. People attribute that to his deft putting, but I think it had a lot to do with game management, too. With four pars on Shinnecock's tough Redan, Goosen obviously knows how to analyze and execute.
link to article:
http://tinyurl.com/53mmg