Who’s Afraid of a Center-Line Bunker?

I’ll put it this way: I’d feel better about my job security if I were a Twitter employee under Elon Musk than if I were a center-line bunker on the PGA Tour.

One of the few such bunkers that remains is in the middle of the fifth fairway at Kapalua’s Plantation Course and will be in action at this week’s Sentry Tournament of Champions. The bunker has been there since the 2020 event, and the story behind it says a lot about the state of golf course design in the professional game.

When Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw built the Plantation Course in 1991, they intended the fifth hole to be a reachable par 5. The 70-yard-wide fairway tilted from left to right, toward a massive ravine that ran along the side of the hole before swerving in front of the green. The strategic concept was simple: the more you risked going into the ravine on your tee shot, the shorter your carry would be to reach the green in two. Back in ’91, when most serious players were using wound balls and many had not made the transition to metal woods, the hole posed a real risk-reward dilemma. It was 530 yards long, and in a time when the average drive on the PGA Tour traveled about 260, that was a lot of ground to cover in two shots. The advantage gained by hedging toward the canyon on the inside of the dogleg would have been meaningful.

No. 5 at the Plantation Course before 2020

Well, by 2019, the average driving distance on tour had risen into the mid-290s, and the fifth at the Plantation had become outmoded. Bill Coore attended the Tournament of Champions that year, and he was disturbed by what he saw. Here’s how Ron Whitten told the story for Golf Digest in January 2020:

‘Everybody hit it up the left side,’ Coore said. ‘Nobody challenged the ravine on the right side off the tee. After the tournament, I walked out to the fairway and found almost all the divots were in one big area on the left center of the fairway.’

What Whitten doesn’t say is that 21st-century distance gains had created this state of affairs. Most PGA Tour pros could aim left on No. 5 without regret because they knew they would still have nothing more than a mid-iron into the green. The benefit of chancing a penalty on the right side had become marginal at best. The hole had lost its strategic integrity, and Coore knew it.

He marked the spot, and the next morning he went out with Ben, who agreed the tee shot on 5 had become ‘mindless.’ They discussed placing a bunker in the center of the patch of divots, to force players to position their drives. Crenshaw suggested that some may choose to aim at the bunker and fade it into the right side of the fairway, which would still be some 40 yards wide, but edged by that ravine. They flagged out the proposed bunker [at about 300 yards].

This is a time-honored trope of strategic golf course design: find where the best players’ drives end up and build a hazard in that exact spot. It’s essentially what John Low and Stuart Paton did in their pathbreaking renovation of the fourth hole at Woking. They forced skilled golfers to risk something for the reward of a favorable position in the fairway.

Reasonable solution, right? Not really, according to various geniuses at the PGA Tour:

Soon, [NBC commentator Mark] Rolfing, [PGA Tour VP of design services Steve] Wenzloff, and tour officials inspected it. Tour players don’t like bunkers in the center of the fairway, they said. Especially a bunker so deep that they can only pitch out sideways.

Sure, Bill Coore is probably the greatest living golf architect. But what about the likes and dislikes of PGA Tour pros, the most coddled athletes in the history of sports? What about the Acushnet-sponsored thoughts of Webb Simpson and Justin Thomas? Whose take is to be trusted here?

So Coore and Crenshaw agreed to make it a shallow bunker, knee deep at its deepest, so players would still have a chance to escape with a 5-iron and reach the green.

Thank Jesus. It would be terrible if a tour player weren’t able to go for the green on a par 5 after dumping his drive in a bunker.

The bunker was built, with a face of sand just high enough to be seen from the tee. It will be a noticeable change to the 2020 Sentry. Afterwards, Coore & Crenshaw plan to meet with the others to [assess] its value and decide whether to keep it or fill it in.

No. 5 at the Plantation Course after 2020

The good news, I suppose, is that the bunker still exists three years later. The bad news is that it hasn’t really affected play (probably because of the Tour’s request that it… not really affect play).

In the 2020 and 2021 editions of the Tournament of Champions, probably because of adverse winds, very few drives were in danger of going in the bunker. Two of the longest hitters on tour, Gary Woodland and Cameron Champ, found it in ’20 and ’21, respectively. Woodland was up against the front lip and had to lay up. He made par. Champ reached the green on his second shot and two-putted for birdie.

The real test of the bunker came at last year’s tournament, when helping winds allowed the field to average 294.5 yards off the tee on No. 5 (compared to 275.6 in ’20 and 281.4 in ’21). Over four rounds, 10 out of 152 drives found the sand. In eight of those cases, the players went for the green on their next shot. The scoring average from the bunker was 4.4, only about 0.3 higher than the overall scoring average on the hole. Which, yup, makes sense. A third-of-a-stroke penalty is about what you get when Steve Wenzloff says your bunker, like a prep-school skirt, can’t be higher than your knee.

An even friendlier aspect of the bunker’s design—and a well-established PGA Tour motif—is the ring of rough that surrounds it, which prevents many balls from rolling in. At the 2022 TOC, 16 tee shots got hung up in this strip of longer grass. The scoring average from there was 4.125. Easy living.

According to Coore, the intention of the change on No. 5 was to persuade the pros not to bash it mindlessly up the left side of the fairway. In this isolated sense, the bunker might be working. The scatter plots of tee shots from the past three years, compared to those from 2017 to 2019, suggest that players have shifted their lines slightly to the right.

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Still, almost no one is actually finding the ravine that the bunker was supposed to bring back into play. From 2017 to 2019, eight drives landed in the hazard; from 2020 to 2022, just three did.

So No. 5 at the Plantation Course, as it’s played in the Tournament of Champions, continues to be a kinda-hard par 4, not an exciting half-par hole on the model of 13 at Augusta. In the past three years, the scoring average has sunk to 4.15, almost a quarter-stroke lower than the three years prior, and there has been a grand total of one layup from the fairway (shout-out Kevin Kisner).

What if the PGA Tour were to allow Coore & Crenshaw to build a properly threatening, St. Andrews-style center-line pot on the fifth at Kapalua? One that exacts a true price for over-aggression? Would the pros do more to avoid it? Perhaps adjust their aim more toward the ravine or take less than driver off the tee? Would some of the risk-reward tension be restored to the hole?

As long as the Tour remains terrified of its most sensitive players, we’ll never know.