Double and triple bogeys are just not sexy

Idon’t understand this obsession with setting up a golf course for the US Open with rough that resembles a jungle and greens as slick as marble to keep scoring down. Brooks Koepka put paid to that at Erin Hills, didn’t he? In fact, a good many guys in the field made a mockery of your efforts to beef up the course and make it well-nigh unplayable, and I’m glad they did.

When I watch professional golfers in action, I do so to appreciate their immense talent with club in hand. If a player shoots in the low 60s, it’s because he has played well. I love seeing birdies, eagles and albatrosses. It’s why I watch the game. To make things more difficult by allowing the fescue to grow so tall that members of the gallery are losing their kids in it is just dumb. To make greens so fast a ball gathers pace going uphill is just dumb.

You don’t see the Formula 1 guys pouring oil all over the track before a Grand Prix to make it more testing for the drivers (although that might be worth watching). They don’t ask footballers to all wear blindfolds to negate their @GuyHawthorne skills (again, it would make for really amusing TV). And you don’t see a doubles tennis match where team-mates are asked to tie two of their legs together (remember those ridiculous three-legged races at school where just getting to the finish line without plough- ing face-first into the turf was an achievement?) So why try turn a golf course into something that is unplayable for the majority of the field? If I wanted to watch grown men reduced to tears of frustration I would watch Keeping up with the Kardashians. But I don’t.

I want to see 300m drives that, even though they are just off the fairway, don’t require a grader to excavate. I want to see a well-executed iron shot reward the player with an eagle or birdie opportunity and not disappear down one of the ski slopes surrounding the green. I want to see a good putt, hit at a good pace and on a good line, go into the hole, not lip out and race off the green like an F1 car on an oil-slicked track.

The reason we watch professional sport is to appreciate the skills of the players and marvel at their ability to do things most of us find impossible. If I wanted to watch players scoring sixes and sevens on par-fours, I would just go down to Huddle Park.

But I see that every weekend and it’s not pretty. It’s certainly not something I would want to do to while away a few hours in front of the TV. Capisce?