Introducing the most famous bunker in the world … now trending on Google! And from the most famous bunker, we have the best line in a golf story so far this year. From Waggle Room, describing the course which played host to the PGA Championship, and resulting doom for Dustin Johnson:
In other words, Whistling Straits is a transvestite of a course … an ugly man in makeup and a wig, in stockings and heels staring into the mirror thinking it is a pretty girl. It isn’t. It can’t be. It never, ever will be.
Ha. Johnson claimed, as you know, that he didn’t know that this was a bunker, and thus grounded his club, and was later penalized two strokes for that infraction. That ousted him from a playoff and denied him a shot at the title, sending him instead to fifth place.
But as you can see in the photo (obtained by SportsbyBrooks), this is pretty clearly a bunker … albeit a bunker you’d expect to find at a small-town municipal course where you can play two rounds for seven bucks, and the waitress in the clubhouse is a 50-year-old with too much lipstick named Candy.
Believe it or not, this was part of the vision of course architect Pete Dye, who credits his wife with the idea of creating more than 900 bunkers, in an attempt to make the course resemble a windswept stretch of Irish coast. More hilarious observations from Waggle Room on that:
Mr. and Mrs Dye: I have been to Ireland. I have played golf in Ireland. Your course is no Ireland.
Dye consistently tries to outdo himself and constantly tries to build more and more severe tests of the game that end up being more like an afternoon with the Marquis De Sade than a day in a slice of heaven.
Pete Dye may think that “golf is not a fair game” and that he is under no obligation “to build fair golf courses” but quite honestly, his work at Whistling Straits only reminded me of the true genius of men like the unsung Jo McKenna (Ballybunion), Old Tom Morris (Prestwick) and Alistair MacKenzie (Augusta National, Cypress Point) — they built incredibly difficult golf courses that are as capricious as any vivacious woman and as impossible to fully conquer, but at the same time, they didn’t move the heavens and the earth to make their courses artificial silicone sisters that are, well, frauds.
If you want to see a truly great execution of a links-style golf course in the US that’s far from the ocean, perhaps you should take a look at Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Nebraska (pictured here). There, Coore & Crenshaw carved out perhaps the most natural course built in the US in the 20th Century. It is extremely tough, and visually it has many of the same features that Whistling Straits aspires to. The difference is that this course is the real thing, and its hazards were largely created by God, not by Pete Dye’s wife.
Brilliant.
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Whistling Straits — A Transvestite of A “Links” Course [Waggle Room]
Photo: Dustin Johnson clearly hit out of bunker [SportsbyBrooks]
