Dons Golf Journal - Musings From Paradise

Feb. 12, 2010

Dr. Alister MacKenzie wrote that if you wanted to get people to leave the game of golf, all you would have to do would be to make all the fairways and greens flat, thereby taking all the luck out of bounces, stances, and lies. He thought that without the element of luck people would get bored with the game. MacKenzie is still perhaps the greatest of all Golf Course architects, with courses such as Cypress Point Club, Royal Melbourne, Crystal Downs, Meadow Club, and Augusta National still considered the best in the world, and... he's a doctor, so I tend to believe him.

A few weeks ago in a USGA Rules seminar, John Morrisett, Head of Rules and Competitions for the USGA, mentioned that if you wanted to simplify the Rules of Golf, all you would have to do is place the ball and eliminate dropping of the ball. He said that you would eliminate about one third of the decisions and a good number of the rules violations that we see in tournaments. So why doesn't the USGA and Royal and Ancient do it? Simply because it would eliminate luck from the equation.

Everyone who plays golf has dropped a ball and had it come to rest in a bad position - place a ball and it is always perfect. As Forrest Gump may have said during his "golf" phase, "A drop is like a bowl of chocolates - you never know what you are going to get." Luck is, and should be part of the game.

Now I consider myself a lucky guy. I feel that I get more than my fair share of lucky breaks, and I certainly have been in the right place at the right time more often than not in my career. So, please don't take the following account as sour grapes. Luck tends to even out over the long run, but there are some rounds, some tournaments where luck or the absence of luck is skewed. Our last tournament in Hawaii was one of the latter.

Mauna Lani is a course cut out of a massive lava bed. The lava comes into play on almost every hole. We had an unlucky tournament. Now, a golf coach sees a lot of shots, not only of his own players but a lot the other teams as well. The following are some of the things I witnessed during the course of the competition.

1. Conor (McElyea) hit a ball into the fairway on a difficult par-5. It bounced twice then bounced off line and into the Lava. Taking an unplayable lie option of two club lengths had him still standing in the lava with the ball in the deep rough. The very next player to play from that tee snapped his shot some five yards deeper into the lava than Connor's ball where it hit and bounced out to the middle of the fairway.

2. Chris (Cunningham), hit a beautiful wedge to a par-3. The hole had a water hazard lined with lava in front of the green, which swooped around in back of the green as well. Chris landed about three feet from the flag then caught a slight down slope and slowly rolled off the green into the hazard where it was unplayable in the lava. In the next group, a player hit his ball short. It hit the lava in the hazard in front of the green and bounced onto the green where it rolled across it and into the hazard behind the green where it hit the lava for a second time and bounced back up onto the green from where he made par.

3. The 16th Hole had a tree in the center of the fairway about 290 yards out. The tree trunk was not more than three feet in diameter. Both Domingo (Jojola) and Dash (Lindsell) had otherwise perfect drives role gently into the roots of this tree, necessitating the need for an unplayable ball drop and loss of a stroke. They were the only two balls to end up against the roots that I observed in the tournament.

4. Even our starting position was unlucky. There was a real tough stretch of holes from #3 through #5, which were extremely hard when the wind was into the player. We had to finish on these holes, and on the first round had two of our players finishing in the dark on the par-3, 5th hole. We lost 5 strokes to par with those two players. And, guess what? We got to finish on those holes again the third and final round.

About this time I started looking for lightning bolts.

No excuses, our team did a lot of things right and had a lot of fun doing so. You would have to in order to beat the No. 7-ranked team in the nation. I just wonder what would have been our finish if we had just a little luck of the other kind. Tell you what - we will take payback in the WCC Championships and call it even.