AKRON, Ohio -- The PGA Tour is conducting an experiment of sorts this week at the Bridgestone Invitational, a move to presumably heighten excitement by lowering the grass.
One year after play at host Firestone Country Club became too difficult in the minds of players, the rough was trimmed to a tolerable 2 1/2 inches to start the tournament week.
Rest assured, the mower blade cuts both ways.
In the spring, players began to grouse at the Policy Board level about the difficult setups seemingly in vogue over the past two years, complaining that high rough made for tedious rounds, fewer birdies, caused injuries and slowed play. There's even a possibility the setup used this week at Firestone might become the general rule, rather than the exception, going forward.
But let's consider the counter-argument by way of a timely example.
Early this week, Phil Mickelson tried to characterize how his first 15 months had gone under new swing coach Butch Harmon. Lefty said he felt his swing had become more compact and that his misses off the tee were less broadly scattered.
Perhaps so, but he's still missing fairways. In fact, Mickelson has played 12 consecutive rounds without hitting more than 50 percent of his fairways in a given day. He won a tournament earlier this year at Riviera Country Club despite hitting 48 the short grass 48 percent of the time off the tee.
You can bet the tour is giddy about the names atop the leaderboard entering the fourth round at the vaunted World Golf Championships event -- Mickelson is joined by fellow bomb-and-gouge proponents Vijay Singh and Retief Goosen in the top five after 54 holes. But aficionados should have reservations about the manner with which Mickelson, in particular, is co-leading.
He's fired three straight sub-70 rounds on a tough track despite finding exactly half his fairways over the first three rounds combined. That figure equals the total number of rounds he recorded in the 60s in his previous 19 trips around Firestone entering the week.
This purely scientific aside is from the PGA Tour's Shotlink data-collection crew, released after the third round:
While he remains among the leaders this week, Mickelson continues to struggle from the tee finding only 50% of the fairways and ranking T65 out of 80 players in the field.
Phil has not hit more than nine fairways in a round on tour since the third round of the Memorial Tournament -- spanning his past 12 rounds, including the U.S. Open at Torrey Pines. His lowest driving-accuracy percentage in his 34 career victories on tour came at this year’s Northern Trust Open at Riviera where he found 48% of the fairways from the tee.
In other words, Mickelson, who early in the week personally applauded the setups used this year by the tour staff, could very well win a second title in 2009 despite missing half the fairways.
The less-punitive setup this week allows players to advance the ball from the rough and take shots at the green with less control over the ball, heightening their creativity and bringing into play a variety of consequences should the shot not be properly executed. Last year, and at various other sites along the way in 2008, like at the Memorial, the rough was so deep, players said they had little choice but to hack the ball into the fairway.
Fair enough. But is there some happier medium?
Let's play devil's advocate. Stating the case for traditionalists out there, shouldn’t players be paying higher penance for repeatedly missing the short grass? Mind you, Geoff Ogilvy won the other WGC stroke-play event this year while missing more than half the fairways, earlier this year at Doral in Miami.
No question, too much rough makes the game boring and one-dimensional, like those old U.S. Opens of yore. Too little rough turns the tournaments into a bomber's paradise, with diminished risk for those grabbing driver off the tee and flailing away with little risk. Frankly, there surely are municipal courses in Ohio with deeper rough than what players are facing at Firestone this week.
I am going to continue beating this horse until the French sell it off as table meat, since a balancing act via lawnmower seems impossible. So, perhaps the only fix lies in looking outwardly.
If the game's two global governing bodies at the Royal & Ancient and U.S. Golf Association could kindly get off their bureaucratic butts and implement the proposed ban on U-grooves in irons -- a rule that was initially set to be enacted in early 2009 but has been delayed for an indeterminate period -- then perhaps I’d stop whining.
Players would still be able to advance the ball out of Firestone-sized rough, but with less spin control. Call me a prude, but even after years of the bomber mentality, guys being handed winner's checks for $1.35 million while playing on the wrong side of the gallery ropes still feels all wrong.