For a course that warns players how hard it is, most of the putting greens are surprisingly devoid of big slopes.
Let’s just get this out of the way: Most of the greens at Bethpage Black are pretty flat. For the two dozen players in this week’s Ryder Cup in New York, the biggest challenge on many of the greens will be to not over-read putts, as it’s easy to see break that simply isn’t there.
For players of this caliber, who are accustomed to putting at top-tier private courses such as Oakmont or Augusta National that feature much more dramatic slopes on their greens, most of the putting surfaces at the Black Course shouldn’t be a problem at all. There are plenty of hills and dramatic slopes all around the course, except on the greens, so don't be surprised to see several players get hot with the putter this weekend and start rolling in putt after putt.
“I think a general description is the greens are not severe,” Kerry Haigh, the chief championship officer for the hosting PGA of America and longtime course-setup guru, told Golfweek. “There's a couple that have, I'd say, more pronounced slopes and movements than others. No. 15 comes to mind, maybe 17 a little bit, No. 8. So there's a handful that have more movement than others, but generally speaking, the slopes are not extreme.”
Overall, 12 of the 18 greens at Bethpage Black don’t have much slope at all. For a course with a sign warning about how difficult the whole place is, this sounds unlikely. How hard can it be if the greens are flat? But for evidence, we can turn our attention to heat maps and slope guides for the greens, as provided by PuttView, the maker of premium yardage books for thousands of courses around the world.
PuttView’s yardage books include slope guides, showing the degree of slopes with arrows all across the greens. But an even easier way to see how much slope is present on any green is the heat maps, which assign color to various degrees of slope. A relatively tame 1 degree of slope shows up as a blue area. Light green represents 2 degrees of slope, and darker green moves into 3 degrees of slope. A red area indicates 5 degrees of slope, which means a rolling golf ball won’t stop when the greens are prepared to championship speeds, as they will be for the Ryder Cup. Purple represents extreme slopes of 7 degrees or greater.
PuttView’s heat maps reveal that twelve of the greens at Bethpage Black have little or no red areas. Most of the slopes are 3 degrees or less. Several greens have few spots with more than 2 degrees of slope. No. 2 is a great example, its green featuring not a bit of red and not even any dark green on the heat map shown below, as the slopes never approach 3 degrees. Expect the pros to make a lot of putts on this green in the Ryder Cup.
For comparison, check out a heat map of a green at Muirfield Village in Ohio, annual site of the PGA Tour’s Memorial Tournament. The Ryder Cup players will be familiar with these much more challenging greens, which were designed by Jack Nicklaus. All of the heat maps at Muirfield Village show swaths of red and some even have a bit of purple, with pinnable locations often divided by speedy slopes. No. 18 is a prime example, as seen below. Muirfield Village is indicative of the putting challenges these pros face throughout the year, and the fact these guys can make putts on such greens is a testament to how well they can roll the rock.
Bethpage Black is legendary for its difficulty, even if scores in recent major championships there have gotten progressively lower. So why are the greens so flat? Rees Jones has renovated the layout, and he certainly knows how to build slope into a green if he so chooses. Likewise with A.W. Tillinghast, who originally designed the Black Course – he is credited with the design, though much of the construction was completed by and plenty of design credit should go to longtime Bethpage superintendent Joseph Burbeck.
Most of Tillinghast’s greatest courses were built for private clubs, the same way that most major championship courses renovated by Jones are at private clubs. Those clubs don’t have to worry about the massive traffic seen at the state-owned and public-access Black Course, which hosts more than 30,000 rounds per year. For a course to accommodate such volumes of play, the greens need to offer many pinnable areas where the hole can be cut without extreme slopes. If pinnable areas were more restricted at the Black, as at many top-tier private clubs with greens that feature steeper slopes, the foot traffic in those areas would beat up the grass and ruin the putting surfaces.
The flatter greens do “allow for a lot more options for hole locations, which is certainly a positive in my mind and makes sense for a public course where you have a lot of play day in and day out,” Haigh said. “If you can move the holes around to a lot of locations, it helps spread the wear out.
“And for Ryder Cup play, you can certainly look to find interesting and fun locations, or even have a few less challenging hole locations if you want to make some holes more accessible. So that part of it is certainly fun and nice to have.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Bethpage Black offers up flattish greens for Ryder Cup
Category: General Sports
