In 1974 the best golfers on earth came to Winged Foot and not one broke par on opening day. Gary Player’s even-par 70 was the best score on the course; forty-four players shot 80 or worse; Hale Irwin won at +7. They called it the Massacre at Winged Foot, and fifty years later most people still believe the golf course did it. It didn’t.
The same greens play as a hard-but-fair members’ course 360 days a year. The carnage is a maintenance job: graduated rough running from an inch at the fairway’s edge to near five inches deep, greens cut low and rolled to a firmness that rejects a flushed iron, and a green speed the USGA actually holds down, to around eleven feet, because past a certain number A.W. Tillinghast’s slopes won’t hold a ball at all. Director of golf courses Steve Rabideau keeps bentgrass and Poa annua alive at the edge of death for one week on national television.
Here’s the proof the broadcast skips: the same greens that gave up a +7 winner in 1974 and a field that couldn’t break par in 2006 also produced Fuzzy Zoeller at four under in 1984 and Bryson DeChambeau at six under in 2020, the only man under par. Same slopes, opposite outcomes. The dirt didn’t change; the setup decision did. Augusta runs the same agronomy with the opposite intention: all year to look flawless, versus one week dialed to a knife’s edge and called fair.