PLAYBOOK
GOLF
BUNKER MENTALITY No matter where you turn your gaze at Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club, you see them: bunkers—an endless array of bunkers. They line the fairways, strangle the landing areas and violate the personal space of the greens. Precisely 205 traps will dot the British Open track—more than at any other venue in the Open rota—when the first group tees off July 19. Lytham, which has hosted 10 Opens, sits a mile from the Irish Sea but boasts nary a water hazard. So the bunkers provide Lytham’s main line of defense and the key to winning. As head greenskeeper Paul Smith says, “Avoid the sand at all costs.” —Scott T. Miller
DATA DIVE
ROYAL PAINS In the 2000 British Open, Tiger Woods famously navigated St. Andrews without landing in one of the course’s 112 bunkers. Masterful ball striking? Sure— but child’s play compared with accomplishing the same feat at Lytham. As our analysis of the past 16 British Opens shows, golfers are three times more likely to find the sand at Lytham (3.51) than at St. Andrews (1.17). *ALL STATS COURTESY OF BIGGA
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DEGREE OF DIFFICULTY The walls of Lytham’s fairway bunkers rise at an angle of 55 degrees; greenside, 65 to 75. This one, which fronts the green on No. 8? Seventy degrees. Crampons, anyone?
BOTTOMLESS PIT The deepest and most penal bunker at Lytham, this eighth-hole beast boasts 34 sod layers and is 104 inches deep.
BUILT TO THRILL
TROUBLED PAST Golfers have been 61% more likely to hit into a bunker at Lytham than at any other Open venue since 1996.*
At the bottom of Lytham’s bunkers lies the same indigenous sand you’ll find a mile down the road at the town beach—sand that has carpeted Lytham’s traps since the club’s founding in the late 19th century. But don’t let the au naturel filling fool you. The faces of these bunkers have been revetted, one sod layer piled on top of another to exacting, brutal specifications. So brutal, in fact, that golfers adept at shotmaking from the bunkers—such as Lee Westwood, Luke Donald and Jim Furyk—might not have the advantage here. “The guys who become good bunker players are in them a lot,” says ESPN golf commentator Scott Van Pelt, who covered the Open at Lytham in 2001. Instead, look for control golfers such as Justin Rose or U.S. Open runner-up Graeme McDowell come Sunday.
STOP, BALL, STOP Many of Lytham’s bunkers lie in swales, so shots appear to be sucked into them by some evil force. That force is gravity. This one, 24 yards from the green, was lowered for the Open to increase its magnetic pull.
BEWARE: MINEFIELD
Before the 2001 British Open at Lytham, David Duval made a pact with himself: Never go at the green from one of Lytham’s deep and treacherous fairway bunkers. It’s a sucker play. But when Duval’s ball found a fairway bunker during the second round and he saw he had a mere 110 yards to the green, he gambled. It’s a sand wedge, he thought. I can get this to the green no problem. The ball didn’t even make it halfway up the bunker’s face before rolling back to his feet. Despite the ensuing double bogey, Duval went on to win his first and only major two days later by avoiding Lytham’s only true hazards. “If you drive it into a couple of fairway bunkers on Thursday and Friday, your golf tournament’s over,” says Duval, who will attempt to defend his 2001 title this year.
TWENTY, THE HARD WAY The 17th hole features 20 bunkers, the most of any hole on the course. The 467-yard par 4 was the third hardest at Lytham in the 2001 Open, playing to a stroke average of 4.36.
FACIAL RECONSTRUCTION Lytham rebuilt 140 bunkers for the Open and added nine new ones. The faces of these three were all rebuilt—all the better to snag approach shots swatted down by the prevailing headwind.
SANDS OF SORROW 205
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185
NUMBER OF BUNKERS AVERAGE BUNKERS HIT PER ROUND
148 117 3.49
115
112
3.23
84 1.92
106
3.52
2.42
2.48
2.27
ESPN The Magazine 07/23/2012
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illustrations by BRYAN CHRISTIE DESIGN