Phil Mickelson calls this golf-etiquette breach a ‘huge problem.' Is it?
Phil Mickelson calls it a "huge problem" in golf, an unhappy consequence of the Covid boom.
Overcrowded tee sheets? Grinding pace of play? Not exactly.
In a recent post on X, the six-time major champion and sometimes social-media provocateur railed against what he regards as a scourge of un-raked bunkers – sandy minefields pocked with the footprints and wedges of golfers who can't be bothered to smooth things over.
"It's so disrespectful to everyone playing behind you not to rake the bunkers properly (or not repair pitch marks)," Mickelson wrote. "Since Covid this has become a huge problem even at the nicest of clubs."
Is Lefty right? Brian Green, a longtime member of the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America and director of golf maintenance at Lonnie Poole Golf Course at North Carolina State, says yes.
"It's gotten worse," he told GOLF.com.
Part of it, Green says, is an etiquette gap – new golfers who picked up the game during the pandemic and never got the memo about leaving the course as you found it. But it's also a Covid hangover. Remember when we weren't supposed to touch flagsticks or rakes? "People got used to that kind of contactless golf," Green says. "And a lot of them have kept up the habit."
Green isn't ungrateful for all the newbie play. Full tee sheets are "a good problem to have," he says. But when you spend roughly 20 percent of your maintenance budget on bunkers, seeing them left in disarray stings. Recently, Green watched a player take two hacks in a bunker and walk off without so much as glancing at a rake that was a few steps away. Green drove up and had a conversation with the scofflaw.
"I usually don't go up to golfers during a round and say anything," he says. "But in a case like that, I just felt I had to."
So yes – it's a problem. But like most on-course annoyances, it's a privileged one. And how riled up about it do you want to get? In the thread in which Mickelson's post appeared, several commentators went further in venting their dismay, decrying the bunker-etiquette issue as a symptom of wider societal rot.
"This extends beyond the golf course," one post read. "It's like people have lost all of their soft skills since Covid."
Or maybe it’s just that they’ve been spending too much time on social media.
Bottom line: If you’re lucky enough to be playing golf, you probably shouldn’t let a few un-smooth bunkers set you off. They certainly shouldn’t send you into existential despair. A lot of it comes down to managing expectations. At a busy public course, you've got to know that imperfections – and etiquette lapses – come with the territory. The rough won't always be perfectly mown, the greens won't always be glassy, and the sand might look like it's been walked through by a small herd. So what? That's golf in the real world.
It's also worth remembering that bunkers are supposed to be hazards. They're meant to test your skill and patience. The top-ranked course in the world, Pine Valley, doesn't even have rakes. Players are asked to smooth things out with their feet and move on.
Somewhere along the line, golfer expectations got dialed way up. Between hyper-manicured private clubs and the pristine conditions we see on TV, we've come to believe that every bunker should be as finely tended as a sand mandala. But perfect lies bunkers are a modern luxury, not a birthright. They weren't always baked into the game.
If you really can't abide it, make a local rule among your buddies: If your ball settles in a footprint, you can lift it and place it nearby – still in the bunker, but out of the mark. Then play your shot without complaint. And, of course, rake when you're done.
Because the truth is, on-course comportment cuts both ways. A messy bunker might say something about someone else's manners. How you react to it says something about yours.
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