HOYLAKE, England — Most of the 156 competitors in the field at the 151st Open Championship have an opinion about the 80-odd pot bunkers that litter Royal Liverpool like landmines, and few of them are effusive. The word “penal” hasn’t been used this often by a group of male jocks since autocorrect was invented thirty years ago.
Some players were sanguine about the challenges faced in the sand, including two whose misadventures on the final hole in the first round saw them either playing backward or pin-balling off the revetted sod walls.
“Proper penalty structures,” said Jon Rahm.
“You’re riding your luck,” said Rory McIlroy.
The trauma about traps owes to the fact that bunkers at Royal Liverpool aren’t maintained in a customary concave style, with sand slopes flashing up the walls to provide loft for escape and help balls roll toward the flat center of the hazard. Instead, bunker floors are flat or even slope slightly toward the walls, which are mostly perpendicular. This setup substantially increases the chances of a player finding his ball flush against the wall, or at the very least having to manufacture a body-bending stance seldom achieved by any athlete not working a balance beam.
LIVE LEADERBOARD: The Open Championship Tournament Leaderboard Scores, Schedules, Pairings and More
After multiple such occurrences on Thursday, the R&A lost its nerve and loosened the thumbscrews.
“Yesterday afternoon the bunkers dried out more than we have seen in recent weeks and that led to more balls running straight up against the face than we would normally expect,” Open organizers said in a statement Friday morning. “We have therefore raked all of the bunkers slightly differently to take the sand up one revet on the face of the bunkers. We routinely rake bunkers flat at most Open venues but decided this adjustment was appropriate in light of the drier conditions which arose yesterday.”
The timing of the change is as controversial as the change itself. Since the R&A admitted that conditions worsened during the first round, shouldn’t the same thing have been allowed to happen during the second round to ensure, as best as possible, that each side of the draw faced identical conditions? It’s almost enough to make one wish Sergio Garcia were in the field to lament injustice and favoritism.
The alteration is popular with competitors. “I hit a 4-iron into the 5th hole today and it pitched on top of the bunker and came back in,”…
..
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Golfweek…