There's a logical explanation to Birkdale's fairways. The club's website indicates that a certain vegetation found on the course is usually found in damp grasslands: "This plant reminds us that the fairways were first laid out along naturally wet gullies called dune slacks." Dune slacks, according to geologists, are seams and clefts between seaside dunes that are usually at or below the natural water table. To route the course between the dunes, Hawtree had to use these soggy bottoms. But to use them as fairways, he surely had to fill them in, to get them above the water table.
So why not contour the fill into interesting undulations? It could be that, back in the 1930s, when there were very few golf-course construction firms, a local road contractor (who had the necessary equipment) was hired to do the earthwork, knocking down high points, filling in low points, creating a series of perfectly graded roadbeds fashioned between dunes.
If that sounds unlikely, consider that in 1967, under the guidance of then-consulting architect Fred W. Hawtree (Frederic's son), a local contractor was hired to shave the top off a dune between the tee and green on the par-3 fourth so that golfers could see the bottom of the flag. The contractor got carried away and removed the entire dune, so today the fourth hole is the widest, blandest expanse on the entire property. Needless to say, Hawtree was not pleased, but he was powerless to reverse the mistake. If the son couldn't control one earthmover, can we blame his father for failing to inspire the imagination of an entire construction crew? Actually, we can. Nobody fills in a hole with a hump, unless told to do so.
Our theory about Birkdale's fairways is just a theory, of course. But it makes more sense to us than the club's flapdoodle that its fairways were established in a quest for fundamental fairness.
A GRADUAL TRANSFORMATION
Nearly every open at Birkdale has resulted in some improvements to the course. After the 1961 Open, won by Arnold Palmer in extreme weather, it was decided that the par-3 17th gummed up spectator flow, so it was abandoned in favor of a new par-3 12th created by Fred W. Hawtree in raw dunes. It is an extraordinary hole in beauty and difficulty, and today is considered by some as one of the world's great par 3s. The club history claims Fred's father originally conceived a hole in that area, and the club has an old F.G. diagram with that hole penciled in to prove it, but what it has is the Hawtree & Taylor diagram on which the younger Fred sketched his proposed new hole in the '60s.
After the 1965 Open, Peter Thomson's fifth claret jug and second at Birkdale, Fred was brought back to rebunker the course. He did so reluctantly. His father's crew had carved out bunkers with "laced-edge intricacies," Hawtree later wrote. "Unfortunately, many of his bunkers were transformed on the Scottish model (pot bunkers with stacked-sod faces) for practical considerations by the Royal & Ancient Championship Committee."
Until 1991, Birkdale's greens were nearly as flat and ordinary as its fairways. But after the Open that summer was played on slow, spongy greens ("Pitching into them was like pitching into a laundry basket full of clothes," remarked Jack Nicklaus), the club rebuilt all greens to improve drainage. Martin Hawtree, son of Fred W., grandson of F.G., supervised the task. While replacing eight inches of "black, smelly muck" with a mixture of sand and soil, Martin convinced the club that some contouring of the surfaces was in order, even though some members thought humps and bumps would make the greens easy to read. Martin integrated greens into locales by stretching surrounding mounds and dunes into portions of the putting surfaces, and to make recovery shots a trifle more testing, he fashioned swales off the edges of many greens.
Prior to the 1998 Open, the club also cut down some 6,000 trees that had cluttered the dunes and buffered the mighty winds. Even with a new two-level green, the par-5 17th was the easiest hole in the 1998 Open, so Martin Hawtree rebuilt it a second time, using the back half of the old green as the front half of a new one, and running the remainder up into hand-carved dunes. The contours give the green real character, in contrast to Birkdale's other, more docile greens. He admits some club members don't like it, finding it freakish and out of character. "I feel it is not out of character," he says. "It's simply an extension of the bolder featuring I had attempted at 11 and 15, which were also somewhat controversial after the rebuild."
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