Riddle of the Sands (by kind permission of Golf Quarterly)

Perhaps it is because I play most of my golf threading my way through the severest of sand traps, that I have a deep and difficult relationship with bunkers. What is it about the bunker that is so eternally fascinating? Why does a humble pit in the fairway become such a huge psychological mountain on our finest courses?

I have never really mastered the escape route that will send my ball soaring over the cliff edges of the deeply penal craters in which I so often find myself. There have been periods when my only approach to bunkers has been to avoid them at all costs, even if it means playing wide of the green from 30 yards out. There have been other times when I have walked on air in the assurance that I have mastered a method for plucking the ball out to safety. As James Bond, that most renowned of fictional golfers, mulled over in the heat of his epic battle with Goldfinger at ‘St Marks’...’Should he splash it out...with an outside-in swing, or should he blast it and take plenty of sand?...The easiest shot in golf’. That last thought is where I would part company with Ian Fleming. 

All the contradictory YouTube videos and the coaching books and magazines that I have studied so hard have been false gods to me. (Incidentally, isn’t it wonderful that Golf Quarterly, alone among golf publications, foreswears endlessly repetitive instructional articles garlanded with slow-motion freeze-framed photographs?). I may find a halcyon period of glowing confidence when I positively welcome the challenge of a greenside bunker, but such a state of bliss invariably evaporates without warning. And what panic sets in when I fail to extract the ball first time, my mind leaping and raging and consumed by the fear that I may be down there all day, hitting the ball harder and harder as my perfect lie turns into the most poached of eggs.

The pros, generally and effortlessly, tend to show us the way. Rory McIlroy, with the Open in the palm of his hand at the climax of his 2014 Hoylake triumph, had to rise over a nasty vertical face to escape from the bunker at the back of the 18th green. Needless to say, he casually spun his ball out and secured the most comfortable of pars. Had I had been suddenly transported into his shoes I have often wondered whether I would have managed to get out even in the two shots that would still have won the Claret Jug. I saw Tom Watson in the 2007 Senior Open at Muirfield take two to extract himself from under the towering precipice of the deep fairway bunker on the left side of the 18th fairway – but did he panic? Of course not. After flipping out his second, he hit a majestic iron to the back of the green and comfortably two-putted for victory.

Golf’s annals are full of glorious deeds accomplished from the sands. Sandy Lyle lived up to his name with that magnificent seven iron from the fairway bunker on the 18th to win the 1988 Masters. One of my enduring memories of the incomparable Seve Ballesteros is of him hammering a massive three wood from a fairway bunker in the 1983 Ryder Cup. Bob Tway improbably holed out from a bunker to dash yet another major trophy from Greg Norman’s grasp and win the 1986 PGA title. The great Bobby Jones went full circle, disgustedly picking up his ball after failing to extricate himself from Hell Bunker in 1921 at St Andrews, but nine years later achieving full redemption on his way to his unique Grand Slam by holing a full shot from the fairway bunker on the 4th en route to the 1930 Amateur Championship title.

The Old Course is defended and defined by its 112 bunkers. Tommy Nakajima spent a lifetime in the Road Hole bunker after putting into it when holding the lead in the 1978 Open. He finally tottered out with a quintuple bogey. By contrast, Doug Sanders looked to have lost the 1970 Open, when he hit his second up against the face of the same bunker. With a truly exquisite shot, he nonchalantly curved the ball out next to the pin, apparently impervious to the enormous pressure, with the result that he teed off on the 18th one ahead of Jack Nicklaus to face his destiny with THAT putt.

Some say bunkers are over-rated. Does a great course really need them? Royal Ashdown, for one, is sand-less, allowing narrow fairways and challenging humps and hollows to protect its greens. The 14th at Augusta has no bunkers at all and plays a crucial role down the final stretch in most Masters.

Bunkers are expensive to maintain, as I am only too well aware at our own course at Traigh where we have abandoned two sand bunkers that were never in play. We now retain a mere three to define two holes.We resisted the temptation to turn a 20-foot deep sinkhole that appeared on the course in the winter of 2014 into the deepest sand trap in the country – well, perhaps after the Himalaya monster on the 4th at Royal St Georges. We filled almost all of it in to leave an elegant ‘grass bunker’ to defend our 7th hole.

The number of bunkers on many of the most illustrious courses has sharply fallen.  The 1928 layout of Muirfield’s present course, for example, had many more bunkers than the present links, but the modern architects called in to upgrade the course for the Open are fiendishly cunning. They have effectively doubled the size of many of the hazards, by creating run off areas for yards around the traps that inevitably draw the ball magnetically into their ravenous maws. 

I have come to the conclusion that everything about bunkers is binary. Do you splash or explode? Are you James Bond or Goldfinger? Do you like the carefully-revetted creations of Muirfield or do you prefer the fierce and unkempt shagginess of Rye and Royal County Down (where I feel it must be entirely possible to lose a ball in the long grass bewhiskering the bunker faces)? And are you man or mouse? Do you get out at all costs regardless of where you end up, or do you try to finesse the ball as close as possible to the hole? What if Doug Sanders had played sideways on the 17th and settled for a five? He would then have stood on the last tee tied with The Great Man and surely, instead of playing the last hole so defensively, would have gone for the birdie to win the championship. He would have feathered a running chip through the Valley of Sin up to the pin, rather than hitting the deep sand wedge that left him with that long downhill approach from the back of the green, and ultimately the most famous missed putt in Open history.....

On that note, I must repair to the practice bunker to rebuild my own confidence so that I can stand on the 7th tee at Muirfield, sublimely certain that the deep abysses to the right and left of me hold no terrors, and sure that I can blithely send a soaring shot into the clear blue sky without being traumatised by the pits of perdition.