Rubbernecking At Augusta

Hearty congratulations and general huzzahs to 2008 Masters champion Trevor Immelman. Let me be the first to say, I had absolutely no confidence that he would actually win the thing.

Not that Immelman can't play -- we know he can. He was the PGA Tour's Rookie of the Year in 2006, and already has 7 wins worldwide. He belongs.

What I mean is, I couldn't foresee anyone winning at Augusta on Sunday. It was like watching a train wreck in spikes. The winner, to beat a cliche' to death, was the golf course itself, which yielded a final-round scoring average of 74.67. Immelman's Sunday 75 was the highest final-round score by a Masters champion since Arnold Palmer did the same in 1962.

As contender after contender went smashing into the shoals -- Brandt Snedeker, Steve Flesch, and Paul Casey were all within four shots of the lead on Saturday night, and all three went plus-5 or worse on Sunday -- I was reminded of a comment made by Tom Kite many years ago at the Players Championship near Jacksonville.

It was 1994, when I was a freelance producer for a golf radio network and Kite was still a relevant member of the regular Tour. You may recall the '94 Players as the year that Fuzzy Zoeller famously waved the white towel at Greg Norman, who won the event with a four-round total of 264, a staggering 24 under par.

At one point that week -- probably after his opening-round 65 -- Kite opined that if the Players truly wanted to be considered a "fifth major," as tournament organizers desperately wished, the course needed to be harder.

"The fans want to see us chop," I remember him saying.

This became a theme to the weekend, as several other players were asked about the relative ease of the TPC layout at Sawgrass. Zoeller himself took an opposing stance to Kite, saying "they shouldn't make any changes...there's nothing wrong with the course. It was just the conditions and you can't do anything about that."

(Note: Zoeller shot four rounds of 68 or better at Sawgrass that year and made $270,000 for the effort. What else is he gonna say?)

History suggests that the PGA Tour, which owns the TPC Sawgrass complex, took Kite's words into consideration. The winning score at the 1995 Players Championship was a mere five under par -- 19 shots higher than Norman's blitzing the previous year. In the thirteen Players' Championships since '94, no winner has come within six shots of Norman's tally, and six of those 13 winners didn't crack ten-under.

The 2008 Players will take place next month, and you can expect this 13-year trend to continue, if not worsen. The Stadium course at the TPC Sawgrass was blown up and rebuilt from March 2006 through January of last year. At the moment, the pro tees on the Stadium course have a USGA stroke rating of 76.8 and a Slope of 155 -- that last number representing the highest possible number the USGA will assign to a golf course. It would be no surprise at all if the winner of next month's Players Championship came in at or above par.

Tough setups are hardly new, of course. At the 1974 US Open at Winged Foot -- the famed "Massacre," won by Hale Irwin at 7-over -- the conditions were severe to the point of incredulity. When players complained, as they are wont to do, championship committee chairman Sandy Tatum uttered these famous lines: "We're not trying to embarrass the best players in the world. We're trying to identify them."

(Coincidentally, it has long been assumed that the 1974 Massacre at Winged Foot was the USGA's response to Johnny Miller's final-round 63 at the '73 Open at Oakmont. Greg Norman is to Sawgrass '95 as Johnny Miller is to Winged Foot '74.)

Tatum's iconic statement from 1974 is not only revisited every year at each US Open, it has become the USGA's core philosophy in setting them up. Intentionally or unintentionally, the other majors have followed suit -- even staid Augusta National, which claims to care not a whit about such things.

Ever since Tiger Woods smashed the Masters scoring record in 1997 at 18 under par, the course has undergone a steady diet of subtle changes designed to, well, make it harder. It hasn't done much to stop Woods -- in his four Masters wins, he's a combined 58 under par. However, the "new" Augusta can produce days like Sunday, when two players shot in the 80's and 23 players -- fully half the field -- failed to break 75. Further, as CBS Sportsline's Steve Elling notes, Woods himself has only broken par five times in his last 13 rounds at Augusta National.

Elling begs for a softening of Augusta National because he misses the birdies and "crazy rallies," and it's true that Sunday's final round of the Masters offered nothing in the way of such hope. However, that's not what turns me off about the 'bigger, badder, harder' course setup philosophy.

With all due respect to Tom Kite, he's wrong. I do not watch professional golf to see them chop. If I wanted to see hackers, I would set up a lawn chair along the first fairway at Winter Park Country Club.

I watch professional golf with the expectation of seeing something I CANNOT do. Putting the ball off the green, rinsing a tee shot on a 150-yard par-3, making double or triple on a par-5 -- been there, done that, have the scorecard. Sure, I identify with the misery, but does that mean I want to watch it on television? I suppose there's a sizable element of the golf-watching public that revels in the Tour stars' pain, gives it a mental "now you know how I feel!" at each agonizing miscue, but I'm not in that group. In a related story, I cannot watch five minutes of "Borat" without feeling a pang of discomfort in my stomach. I derive no entertainment value from others' pain or embarrassment.

Of course, I'm not in favor of Bob Hope Classic-style birdiefests, either, and I like watching the US Open just fine. I'm simply asking for something in the middle. Narrow the fairways, plant some trees, do what you gotta do, but soften the greens a hair and keep the tee boxes in the same county as the rest of the course. Allow shotmakers to make shots. "Bomb and gouge" sucks, but so did Sunday.

Can we not have some moderation?