st
these conflicting desires, committees and course designers appear
frequently to have attempted a compromise with no particular
satisfaction to anybody. It is impossible to lay out a course to suit
all the different players in a club, and my own most decided opinion is
that the bunkers and other hazards should always be placed to test the
game of the scratch player, and not that of the handicap man. A course
that is laid out for the latter very often inflicts severe punishment
on the scratch player, and it is surely hard that the man who has spent
many years in the most patient and painstaking practice should be
deliberately treated in this manner when the comparative novice is
allowed to go scot free. Moreover, when a bunker is so placed that a
long carry is needed from the tee, the handicap man will find his game
much improved by playing on the course. At first he finds he cannot
carry the hazard, and for a little while contents himself with playing
short. But he soon tires of this timidity, takes more pains with his
strokes, braces himself up to bigger efforts, and at last the day comes
when his ball goes sailing over the obstruction. Afterwards the
performance is repeated quite easily, and the views of one man as to the
unfairness of that particular carry have undergone a radical change. It
is better for the beginner that he should have a hard course to play
over than an easy one, and, much as he may grumble at the beginning, he
will in the end be thankful to those who imposed a severe experience
upon him in his early days as a golfer.

Therefore, if it is decided that there must be a bunker in the centre of
the course in the line of the drive, I suggest that it should be placed
at a distance of about 130 to 145 yards from the tee. The second bunker,
if there is to be another stretching across the course with a view to
imposing difficulties on second shots or guarding the green, should be
rather less than this distance from the first, so that the man who has
topped his drive and is short of the first hazard should still have a
chance of clearing the next one with his second shot. Recovery ought
never to be impossible. But really I am no believer at all in bunkers
placed across the course. Certainly let there be one in front of the tee
to catch the bad drive, and another to guard the green; but, generally
speaking, the merely short ball carries its own punishment with it in
the distance that has been lost and has t