While it provides a lovely surface for championship golf, you are creating a surface like an airport runway. The way these boys are hitting it, the courses are getting shorter and shorter. In the architectural business we are continually looking for places to move the tees back. Here at the National both ourselves and the Greg Norman group told the board we wanted to wind things back with a coarser grass that would hold the ball on a slope. On the Trent Jones course in winter the ball always rolls to the same hollows and destroys the hole because everyone is hitting from the same spot.
Bunkers guard the ninth green.
The club received the idea with open arms. The grass is like the very best couch. It is nice under foot, springy, bristly and the ball sits up on it. You can use your driver from the fairway. Many people describe the look of the place, with its ocean backdrop and fairways winding their way through a sea of waving grass, as similar to the great links courses of Scotland and Ireland.