Too-slick greens the only glitch in the Village

I don't know if they've read different reports from the ones I've seen, over at GolfClubAtlas, but DJ Trahan's criticism of the 18th at Muirfield Village does seem to have become rather misrepresented.

Trahan clearly wasn't a happy bunny after being 10-over for that one hole over the four days of last weekend's Memorial Tournament but while my fellow GCA forumites seem to think he was attacking the hole in toto, the only reports I can find confine his rancour to the marble-like properties of the green and its surrounds.

And if this little lot is true...

"On Thursday, Trahan was between the two bunkers on the left side of the par-4 hole and chipped onto the green, the ball rolling all the way off and down the steep hill leading to the front of the green"

"The pin was on the front of the green Saturday...He popped up his third shot and it somehow defied gravity by stopping midway up the steep hill leading to the green...His fourth shot went to the green, made a U-turn, then came back at him, rolling into the valley. His fifth followed almost the same route: to the green, then back down the hill to within 3 inches of where he hit it.

...then I have a lot of sympathy for him.

Back in the days when the only thing about Augusta National that raised eyebrows from onlookers was the glassiness of its greens, TV commentator Peter Allis watched one poor chap's efforts there meet with a similarly disproportionate punishment and asked a simple question I always recall whenever a course crosses the line between being defended and being tricked-up.

"Is this golf?"

No, I don't think it is. Punishment fitting the crime is a key element of an ordered Society and sport is a microcosm of this.

You hit a bad chip or putt that any normal green would absorb without spitting your ball off the premises and your punishment is a lengthy return shot, possibly over awkward terrain. For such a shot to roll thirty yards back down the fairway is a sanction more befitting pinball than golf.

I'm all in favour of greens whose topography resembles a basket of eggs and whose firmness means that a pitch shot is not always the automatic play, especially if these features are employed as an alternative defence to tacking another fifty yards on the hole.

How, though, can you expect any golfer to rise to these challenges in a way that spectators enjoy if he's dogged by fears of his ball acquiring a lurid life of its own and disappearing over the horizon?

No, I'm not sure this DJ does need to change the record.