Troon: Where Sarazen And MacKenzie Bickered
The eventual Open Champion grumbled about the future Augusta National architect's Portland design for derailing his effort to make the 1923 Open.
Gene Sarazen was not a fan. Ever.
Even after he won the second-ever Masters on the most Alister MacKenzie’d version of Augusta National imaginable—replete with the 11th hole’s blind centerline bunker, huge back nine par 3 greens, crazy contours and rustic hazards—Sarazen never warmed to MacKenzie.
“I wasn't impressed with Augusta National,” he’s quoted by Golf World as having declared in the late 1970s. “Of course, I was never an admirer on Dr. Alister MacKenzie's architecture. I'd seen several of his courses in Europe. He had more freakish greens than anybody I'd ever seen. Even Colonel Jones, Bob's father, used to complain about it.”
The first man to win the modern career Grand Slam offered this just a few years after his Open Championship career mic drop moment when making a 1973 Open ace on Troon’s Postage Stamp. The shot remains one of only three hole-in-one moments at the famed par 3.
Among all-time greats, Sarazen will never be remembered as the keenest observer of refined or offbeat golf architecture. From public comments in his prime to his years broadcasting Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf shows, Sarazen often took issue with features perceived as messing with a good shot. He’s hardly alone in this light-on-personal-responsibility approach, believing the straight line to a green must be kept hazard-free.
Others in the Grand Slam club have tended to be intense admirers of strategic designs after they’d matured and traveled the globe. They rarely lamented perceived unfairness and embraced what it did to destroy the mental well-being of the competition. This would be the firm of Jones, Nicklaus, and Woods.
Sarazen? He never seemed able to look past what happened prior to the 1923 Open Championship at Troon Portland Golf Club where MacKenzie’s course redesign derailed Sarazen’s bid to qualify.
Despite arriving as the 1922 U.S. Open champion at Skokie—the 1923 U.S. Open was played after early June’s Open at Troon—Sarazen had to first survive 36-holes of qualifying to make the championship. So did defending champion Walter Hagen and just about everyone else. The qualifying was split between the local municipal course and the Troon's freshly-renovated Portland Golf Club which sits next to the big course and this week will be home to the practice range. In 1923 it was a separate club leasing land from Troon Golf Club.
Hagen made it on the number after opening with 82 on MacKenzie’s design. But others fared better.
Five-time Open champion James Braid, who added 67 bunkers to the “old” course at Troon in advance of the Open but at 53 was essentially retired as a player and working as the pro at Walton Heath. He still took part in qualifying in hoping to advance, posting the low first-round score (72) at the MacKenzie design and advancing after a 77 on the municipal.
While Braid had been busy adding an unfathomable number of bunkers to Willie Fernie’s old course hosting year’s Open Championship once again, the Portland Club was recovering from the war years as a training site with limited finances. They were unveiling a MacKenzie redo with the Open qualifier, and it was arguably the most important commission of the legendary designer’s then-burgeoning solo career. As Europe was coming out of the war, the doctor was in the midst of slowly dissolving his partnership in Colt, MacKenzie and Alison. He even occasionally bid on jobs against his advertised partners.
Troon’s invitation to host the 1923 Open came on only a year’s notice because Muirfield was not available. With a savage Braid update to the old course positioned the club as a future rota member. Prestwick soon end its run in 1925. With MacKenzie’s more artistic and strategic approach to the Portland unveiled next door, the two courses offered a design school contrast at a time of knockdown, drag-out philosophic battles over strategic vs. penal thinking.
“We hear a great deal of the contrast between the penal and strategic schools of architecture and I do not propose to become involved in any discussion on that thorny question,” Bernard Darwin wrote in Braid’s biography.
Braid’s work represented one of the last high-profile efforts to penalize stray shots while keeping the center lane free of trouble. His unrestrained style of plugging every loophole in Troon’s old course was commonplace at a time several big-name golf professionals were making a side living as architects (Old Tom and Willie Park Jr. were less inclined to go all in on penal design additions).
Post-war, fewer golfers were enamored with the rough-and-tumble golf pro design approach. Several Old Course-inspired acolytes like MacKenzie were arguing in magazine articles for design touches relying on things like embrace of natural features, discreetly placed intrusions by man, and restoring a sense of the course playing like a nuanced cross-country expedition found on the best early links.
The lightly-documented Portland course featured hallmarks of a MacKenzie: large and rollicking greens, trademark MacKenzie rolls around greens, artfully crafted bunkers placed to interrupt a straight march to the hole, and rewards for playing down the sides of holes instead of the direct tee-to-green path.
Accounts of the time noted that Saraze did not play a practice round on the Portland and just one round at Troon’s old course. He may have been rusty from the five-day Atlantic voyage. There was also a looming “punched face” club controversy involving the Americans called out for roughing up their clubfaces to get more spin, only to the R&A rule the clubs illegal and needing modification. But Sarazen downplayed this as a cause of his trouble.
Sarazen’s opening day round suggested he was in form, and headlines blamed weather for that 85 that prevented Sarazen from advancing to The Open.
“The Sarazen tragedy was largely a matter of weather,” wrote the Irvine Herald. “He went out on Tuesday morning over that testing New Course when the storm was at its worst, and he came to grief, though his aggregate of 160 was not then thought too bad to qualifying. The conditions, however, improved in the afternoon, and with them the scoring.”
A more detailed explanation came straight from Sarazen in a newspaper column after his high-profile failure. He wrote—or more likely said to a transcribing reporter—that he’d “never seen anything like” the weather both in severity and cold.
“I was soaked through round the shoulders, and soon after I got to the ninth my hands were so chilled that I could not feel the grip of my iron club,” Sarazen wrote. “Now that it is all over I do not mind saying I am glad to have had the experience of playing in such weather, but once of that sort of thing is enough.”
He went through a round that included an 8 at the second. “It made me think lots of things,” he wrote in the Daily Record.
Then Sarazen turned on MacKenzie without mentioning the architect by name. He had needed a 4 for a 159 total and what he thought was enough to qualify.
“I hit a glorious drive as hard as I could, and I hit the second also as hard as I could,” he said. “I was not two feet off the line, and they were two perfect shots but I kicked into the bunker. I do not think it is fair to play two great shots absolutely down the middle and get bunkered.”
Sarazen’s embarrassment made world headlines. But since news did not travel as fast, the disappointing overseas trip continued to be the lingering summer story long after Arthur Havers held off Hagen to win the 1923 Open.
MacKenzie felt compelled to respond to Sarazen’s gripe even though its “unfair” qualities fell far down the list of excuses. But with a burgeoning solo design career, MacKenzie knew how one player hissy fits could alter the perception of a course, championship or even an unnamed architect.
The Good Doctor did not mince words in a September, 1923 Golf Illustrated essay for American audiences titled “Sarazen’s Nemesis At Troon.”
“Even on a course so difficult and full of ‘problem play’ as Troon New Course, several of the competitors were content to go out without previous practice,” MacKenzie wrote.
“Even many of those who played over the course failed to realize that the proper line to some of the holes varied completely according to the direction of the wind. And in several cases it was this failure to ‘play with their head’ which was the cause of their downfall.”
Their = Sarazen.
MacKenzie told the story of how he had taken a “relief” course destroyed during World War I after occupation by a military bombing school, before overseeing a complete reconstuction in 1920 and 1921. But did acknowledge the rawness of the Portland.
“The cost of construction was approximately $10,000, and as the work was done when the cost of labor was at its highest and several acres of fairway had to be completely re-turfed, it will be admitted that the cost was not an excessive one,” MacKenzie wrote. “It is, as far as I am aware, the youngest course on which the qualifying rounds of the Championship have ever been held, and the faults of the course are largely owing to its newness. It also has not had the advantage of water being laid on to the greens as is the case in the Old Course [at St Andrews].”
MacKenzie admitted some of the green slopes were “too abrupt” but also blamed the “Committee” for making him retain select natural contours.
“The difficulties in putting on the greens have been accentuated by their newness and the fact that the putting surfaces have not yet become perfect,” he said, before pointing out that Green chairman “Professor Bury” and “Marr, the greenkeeper” had things moving in a better direction at the time of his writing.
The grass lines were not to MacKenzie’s liking, either.
“The difficulties of the course have also been increased owing to the fact that the fairways have not been cut as wide as were originally intended in some places, approaches have not yet become consolidated, and in some cases are so untrue that accurately hit balls get kicked off into bunkers which were not intended for their reception.”
So Sarazen had a point? No.