Brown courses are good courses!

I've been watching as much of The Open as I can and it just reminds me how much I love the British style golf courses. There's nary a flat spot on the course, the gorse and heather are everywhere and the course is brown, brown, and brown.

One of the ABC commentators explained how UK greenskeepers only water the grass enough to keep it alive, where US greenskeepers insist on keeping it growing. This would seem to save on maintenance costs and help the environment as well by saving water and probably eliminate a lot of the application of frightening chemicals.

Even if it doesn't do these earth friendly things, the courses look a lot more fun to play. Courses in the US certainly vary from one another, but only to a point. I'd love to be able to get off my steady diet and go out for some scorched earth links once in a while. Don't all those mounds, swales, dips and depressions look interesting versus the flat green monotonous tracks we are all too familiar with here.

And those pot bunkers, sprinkled around a snakey little course to make every hole and every path to the hole an adventure. Talk about risk reward calculations. And it brings a fair amount of luck into the experience, but it's still fair. Every golfer will get their share of bad and good bounces. It's all about how you handle it.

I can't help but think that all golf in the beginning was played this way. 'Shawn, you can aim right on your drive for a better approach to the green, but better make sure you clear the Hangman's rock or you'll play dearly!'

I play a lot of golf on a lovely little 9 hole track on one of the many islands in Narragansett Bay. It really sets up to be a links course. You can see 2 bridges and lots of water. There's tall ocean grass all around and the greens are excellent for a small public course. But somewhere along the way, every bump and dip has been eliminated. The fairways are 100 yards wide in most cases and the few pines that added some challenge have been cut down because of beetles. Now you pretty much sleepwalk until you're on the green. It's still a fun little course, but it could be so much more if they'd kept more of the natural landscape and let it go brown and thrown in some pot bunkers for good measure. The only problem would have been the legions of golfers this layout might have attracted.