The Level Playing Fields of Birkdale

By Ron Whitten
Photo By Stephen Szurlej July 2008

Within the tumultuous landscape that is Royal Birkdale Golf Club, host of the British Open July 17-20, there lies a conundrum: Why are Birkdale's fairways such fair ways for wayfaring golfers? Keep it in the short grass off the tee, and you can't get anything but a level lie. There's no gee or haw to the flow of these fairways, and no yaw, either. They just lie there, motionless, massive grass landing strips for tee shots launched by the likes of Woods, Els, Harrington and Mickelson.

In all other respects, Royal Birkdale is a world-class course -- we rank it 18th on our list of the 100 Best Courses Outside the United States -- in an otherworldly setting, a rocking, tumbling stretch of sand hills along England's Lancashire coast. The dunes, long ago whipped into peaks by gales off the Irish Sea, frame each hole, isolating most from one another. They're the tallest and most dramatic dunes in the Open rota, providing Birkdale with superior spectator vantage points ever since it first hosted an Open, in 1954.

Because most tee boxes are perched atop the dunes, and the routing changes direction on nearly every hole, impertinent winds can complicate matters. The deep rough of marram grass can be deadly, bunkers can be annoying in their placement, and the greens devious in their contours. One never sees the ocean during a round at Royal Birkdale -- the layout is separated from the shore by a coastal highway -- but this is a classic links.

Except for its fairways. Links are usually characterized by interminable humps and hollows, like those at St. Andrews and Royal Troon, or at the very least by the dips and swales found at Carnoustie and Royal Lytham. But Royal Birkdale's fairways are flat. Dead flat. As flat as the stomach on a supermodel. As flat as a proverbial pancake squished by a steamroller. As flat as the rooftop on Birkdale's ship-out-of-water, art-deco clubhouse. Granted, there are exceptions. The ninth fairway, riding a ridgeline, has some dramatic undulations, particularly short of the putting surface, and the fairways on the 10th and 16th, both par 4s, rise to greet elevated greens.

But the first fairway is flatter than the club's parking lot, which is paved on a slight incline. The eighth fairway is pool-table flat, with pockets, in the form of pot bunkers, haphazardly rearranged, mostly to the right. The 11th fairway, with mound-embraced bunkers spread across the middle, is more like a snooker table. The 17th fairway is a carpeted hallway, between two massive walls of gnarly grass, before turning left to reach a staircase green.

At Birkdale, the fairways, not the greens, are the dance floors, metaphorically speaking, and for generations, writers and critics have rationalized, euphemized, even apologized for the glaring flaw in an otherwise marvelous layout. "The decision to choose the relatively flat areas of Royal Birkdale on which to place the fairways means that the traditional vagaries of links golf are absent," said one writer. "The flattish fairways -- there is very little undulation -- prompt neither freak bounces nor awkward lies," wrote another. The fairways "...were not the adventurous exercise they might have been," wrote a third.

The club's history book from 1989 offers the dizziest amount of spin: "The avoidance of blind shots and the undulating fairways traditionally associated with links golf thus (enables) Birkdale to gain the reputation of being one of the fairest of the championship courses."

A PROBABLE EXPLANATION

We can forgive the club historian for implying that its course is one of the tastiest of cream puffs. What is less forgivable is that the club offers no explanation for how or why its fairways ended up so level, so benign, so untraditional. The club simply reports that they've always been that way, ever since Frederic G. Hawtree, of the famed firm of Hawtree and J.H. Taylor, laid out the course in 1932, replacing an earlier version of Birkdale that finished with a blind par 3 (now the par-3 fourth).

Although the club implies that Hawtree accepted the ground as he found it, there's no evidence that the valleys between the massive sand hills were as level as the floors of coffins. Clearly, they were graded and bladed into their lack of shape. One need only climb to the top of any perimeter dune and gaze outward at the still-untouched rugged natural linksland surrounding Birkdale to realize that there's not a flat spot out there.