Second-Guessing

Fred Couples hits to No. 18 in 2006. Photo: Andrew Redington/Getty Images

In a recent statement to Golf Digest, the club says the second cut has not "eliminated preferred angles for the players," yet suggests the debate is moot because "players don't play the angles anymore to the same degree that was done in [Bobby] Jones' day."

Former Masters competition committee chair Will Nicholson once justified the reduction in fairway width to 36.57 yards as "reasonably generous by major championship standards," though at the time he was defending changes in 2000 to the ninth and 10th fairways. (They were later widened to the original 1999 specifications, and the club continues to fine-tune the contour boundaries.)

Architect Tom Fazio oversaw the second cut's installation and originally suggested that definition was the driving force. "When you look down the first fairway, you can really see where to hit the ball," Fazio told the Augusta Chronicle. "Any time you design a course, you want to frame the hole. If you have a picture, and the frame doesn't work, then you get a new frame."

That perceived dig at the original design and the shock of seeing rough at Augusta drew the ire of Nicklaus. "It looks like it's been done by somebody who doesn't play golf or understand the game," he said at the 2000 Masters. "They have taken a golf course that played for years a certain way and now they have eliminated it."

Upon the introduction of the second cut Langer believed it would force the player "to hit better, more accurate shots coming in." A decade later he feels the second cut has made the course more difficult due in large part to "the question of whether a ball will fly or jump." But Langer, like Crenshaw, is troubled by the reduction in choices off the tee. "You don't have the option any more to drive the ball on the sides of a fairway," he says. "It takes several key angles out of the equation. And I think the course was designed with the angles in mind."

Nicklaus recently reiterated his criticism, insisting the rough makes Augusta National look "a lot like everybody else" and stops too many balls "from getting to the trees." "The rough has done what they wanted it to do from the standpoint of making it so [the players] can't spin the ball as easily into the green," Nicklaus said in February. "That's what they've accomplished. But I'm a proponent of no rough." Phil Mickelson seconds Nicklaus' take and insists the second cut "without question" makes the course easier because it is stopping balls from running into the trees.

The average winning score for the nine "second-cut Masters" is 279.1, while the nine prior to the rough averaged 276.1 Players generally chalk up the higher scoring to nearly 500 yards in added length and a few years of extreme weather. "It's not easier because they lengthened the course so much," say 1998 champion Mark O'Meara, who wants to see erratic drives reach the trees because "Augusta has always been about the ball running."

Club officials counter the criticism of former champions by noting that players armed with today's equipment do not hit the ball as far offline, justifying the narrowing. In limited statistics from last year's tournament, the second cut appeared to deliver the hoped-for half-shot penalty while rewarding tee shots adhering closer to the center lines. "[The second cut] is just long enough to where the ball sits down enough and you can't spin it," says Mark Calcavecchia.

Davis Love III says the flyer-lie component has made a huge impact on his strategy, particularly on the par-4 ninth, where drives reaching the bottom of the hill always found the fairway. "I used to just blow it down there and hope to have wedge into the hole, and if I lost it a little right, it was no big deal," Love says. "Now you really have to hit it straight."